At 05:41 PM 9/14/98 +0200, Daniel Karrenberg wrote:

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"Richard J. Sexton" <richard at sexton.com> writes: At 03:39 PM 9/14/98 +0200, Hakan Hansson wrote:

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At 14:50 1998-09-14 , Richard J. Sexton wrote:

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.FX is the country code for Metropolitan France. This is not a country. Neither is Tuvala any more. Or the Cocos Islands (.CC).

FYI: Faroe Islands (.fo) and Greenland (.gl) are parts of Denmark (.dk) an d they have _never_ been independant countries. Why did they get their own ccTLD in the first place?

I have no idea. Ask Jon Postel.

No, read rfc1591. The possible ccTLDs are defined by the United Nations and published by ISO as ISO standard 3166. The IANA has -very wiselty- decided to use that list and not get involved in arguments exemplified by this thread.

2. The Top Level Structure of the Domain Names In the Domain Name System (DNS) naming of computers there is a hierarchy of names. The root of system is unnamed. There are a set of what are called "top-level domain names" (TLDs). These are the generic TLDs (EDU, COM, NET, ORG, GOV, MIL, and INT), and the two letter country codes from ISO-3166. [...] In the country TLDs, there is a wide variation in the structure, in some countries the structure is very flat, in others there is substantial structural organization. In some country domains the second levels are generic categories (such as, AC, CO, GO, and RE), in others they are based on political geography, and in still others, organization names are listed directly under the country code. The organization for the US country domain is described in RFC 1480 [1]. Postel [Page 1] RFC 1591 Domain Name System Structure and Delegation March 1994 Each of the generic TLDs was created for a general category of organizations. The country code domains (for example, FR, NL, KR, US) are each organized by an administrator for that country. These administrators may further delegate the management of portions of the naming tree. These administrators are performing a public service on behalf of the Internet community. Descriptions of the generic domains and the US country domain follow. The problem seems to stem from the fact that "IANA is not in the business of determining what is and what isn't a country". This is a factual statementmade by IANA. The ISO3661 list containts codes that are not countries. This is a fact. IANA has mad entired in the root zone for two letter domains that are not countries. This is also a fact. So, are all two letter domains supposed to be countires, in which case .TV and .CC should be re-assessed, or, can any ISO code be made into a TLD, in which case .FX could be created. Given that IANA claims to not be inthe business of determining what a country is and instead uses a list that contains country code and non country codes, I would say this is a bit of a mess. -- "I think it is important to understand that distribution of authority is better than dictatorship, and that the governance of TLDs and domains in general should be distributed rather than centralized." - Paul Mockapetris -------- Logged at Tue Sep 15 16:45:36 MET DST 1998 ---------