.GP, .TM, .TV and .MQ to be Removed ?
Richard J. Sexton richard at sexton.com
Wed Sep 16 17:31:55 CEST 1998
At 10:27 AM 9/16/98 -0400, John Charles Broomfield wrote: >Hi Richard, > I agree that the current system is less than perfect, but how would >YOU select what is or not a country. Based on historical facts, not what some company in Europe (ISO) thinks for revisionist politial reasonings. Tibet *used* to be a country, I have Tibetan stamps and all, but China says it's not a country any more. Tough. Tibet is still a country to the Tibetans and to most of the rest of the world >Even further, are you sure it's a good >idea to actually have a body responsible for technical matters draw a list >of what is or not a country? Yes. >I feel that the creation of such a list is a >HIGHLY political affair (Is Palestine a country or not?) Ask the people who were born there. >Say you don't like the name of your street, and you don't like the fact that >your postman brings mail addressed to your street-name. Do you bash your >postman or the post-office? It's not the post-office that decides names for >streets, and to be honest it's not their business either. You take up the >issue of street names with whoever is in charge of naming them (say your >local town-hall for example). You don't start a national campaign >complaining about the way that the postal service designates streets >(basically because it's NOT the PS designating them). You're right, I didn't start a national campaign. Here's what I did: My current address is Box 2, RR #1 Eldorado, Ontario, K0K 1Y0, CANADA It would he hard to think of a more ugly address for a charming 200 year old hotel that is now my residence. Moreso, Eldorado is 10km south of here. Bannockburn actually does exist. We have a big government installed sign, and everything. You can see it here, if you want: http://hastings-county.vrx.net/centre/bannockburn/rd05.jpg So, looking back through the history books I noticed this place used to be called "The Maitland Hotel, Bannockburn, Ontario" So, I simply use the address Maitland House Bannockburn, Ontario, K0K 1Y0, CANADA and that works just fine. I didn't even have to tell Lois, the mail lady. She's bright enough to figure it out. I've never had a problem with people saying "your snail mail bounced". Now, UPS and Fed-Ex can't deliver to *either* of those two addresses. They get all FAW with rural addresses, so, for them our address is 17245 Hiway #62 Ontario, Canada. Include the postal code and it messes them up, all they go by is the 911 emergency markers on the road. >IANA doesn't choose to consider Tuvalu a country and not Scotland. IANA does >however choose to use the ISO-3166 country code list. Do you have any other >suggestion of a list which has the countries that you personally consider >countries with a nice list of two-letter codes (or whatever) that could be >used instead? Didn't think so. Was there a list of .com/net/org/mil/gov/intarpa/edu ? Didn't think so. They were simply created, and the same canbe done for rational country codes. This whole discussion is .moot anyway, because as soon as there is a procedure in place to create new tlds, people will simply deploy three letter country codes as "generic" TLDs (I suppose toretaliate for the "psuedo-generic" two letter contry codes like .to and .nu) which toa great extent is already happening: .pol, .bul, .usa, .aus already exist, and there is nothing that can prevent .tbt or .tibet, .sct or .scotland and so forth. The ISO2 codes are capricous and arbitrary and in a few years will seem as antiquated as .com; both falling into disuse as an obscure relic and a perfect exsmple of state-of-the-art 1986 ISO Internet taxonomoy. -- "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 Thu Sep 17 12:50:19 MET DST 1998 ---------
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