This prompted by the minutes, but it isn't a comment about the minutes: At 21:20 +0200 10/11/06, Peter Koch wrote: ...
please find below the draft minutes of last week's two DNS WG sessions. ... ICANN/IANA Update (John Crain, ICANN) <http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-53/presentations/icann_dns_wg.pdf>
Questions: Rob Blokzijl asked why there was a move to retire old ccTLDs. He could see no technical reason to do this. John agreed that there was no compelling reason. He added that the question remained about whether this should be done. Rob pointed out that current guidelines preclude reuse of ISO3166 country codes for a period of five years. New guidelines will change this to 50 years. Carsten Schiefner commented that .cs was reused recently. Previously it was the code for Czechoslovakia; it was then used for Serbia and Montenegro.
I think there is a reason to retire ccTLDs. Perhaps it is not technical, but, if the ccTLDs are granted according to ISO3166, then straying from ISO3166 as it retires country codes means that IANA would have to have a policy and process for determining when to stray. I think we are protected from having to deal with politics if we have a strict policy of following ISO3166 (plus whatever exceptions we've already grandfathered-in). Once a country code is pulled from ISO3166, if there is a plan for phasing it out (I don't think it is appropriate to debate a plan here as this is an IANA matter) that's what any IANA plan should match. I.e., how long until we yank them from the root zone? At what point should an on-going registry refuse to list an NS record in a retired country code domain? -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Edward Lewis +1-571-434-5468 NeuStar Secrets of Success #107: Why arrive at 7am for the good parking space? Come in at 11am while the early birds drive out to lunch.