> On Apr 30, 2015, at 11:07 AM, Paul Hoffman <paul.hoff...@vpnc.org> wrote: > > On Apr 30, 2015, at 7:35 AM, Andrew Sullivan <a...@anvilwalrusden.com> wrote: >> >> On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 07:28:21PM +0000, Edward Lewis wrote: >>> #ccTLD -- A TLD that is allocated to a country. Historically, these >>> #were two-letter TLDs, and were allocated to countries using the two- >>> #letter code from the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 standard [ISO3166]. In >>> #recent years, there have been allocations of TLDs that conform to >>> #IDNA2008 ([RFC5890], [RFC5891], [RFC5892], [RFC5893], and [RFC5894]); >>> #these are still treated as ccTLDs for policy purposes. >>> >>> "Country" is a loaded term. I don't have a better suggestion in mind but >>> there are many instances where a ccTLD is a territory, etc. I don't mean >>> to open a rathole, just point this out. >> >> If we changed this to say, "A TLD that is allocated using the UN >> country list using the the two-letter code from the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 >> standard [ISO3166]," would that address your concern? > > I would be fine with that wording, but it doesn't hint at what "cc" stands > for. Again, Jon Postel used the word "country code" and "country this" and > "country that" quite liberally in RFC 1591. I'm not convinced we need to step > away from that now.
The “what’s a country” issue is one that we confront constantly, as people ask
us for statistics about Internet bandwidth production, traffic flows, and yes,
even TLDs. There’s just no clean answer. Whether that be the island of Sint
Maarten/Saint-Martin (half constituent country of the Kingdom of the
Netherlands, half overseas collectivity of France) or Cyprus, mention of which
always triggers pro-forma outrage from Turkey.
I completely agree that we should be clear that “cc” stands for Country Code,
and I think we should defer to ISO for their own definition of ISO 3166: "ISO
3166 is the International Standard for country codes and codes for their
subdivisions” no matter how inaccurate that actually seems. Because it’s good
enough, and this is a complex issue that we’re not going to solve, given how
many other people have tried and failed.
But we can acknowledge the complexity, and use some word other than “country”
to describe how the Internet uses these codes.
For instance, we could refer to domains associated with “geographic
territories,” including both ccTLDs, geographic ngTLDs, and geographic IDN TLDs.
-Bill
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