Re: [dns-wg] Elimination of 2nd level ccTLD domain names

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <]

On 21-okt-04, at 15:05, Brad Knowles wrote:

> > >          The ISO is going to run out of potential two-letter ccTLDs 
> > > pretty
> > > soon.  Two letters only give you 676 possible combinations and there 
> > > are
> > > already almost 300 countries.
> >  Which means the number of countries could more than double before
> >  ISO would start running into troubles.
> 	Uh, no.  Re-read that message again.  I'm talking about clustering of 
> names around certain common sequences of characters. Unless you want 
> to hand out the ccTLDs in a totally random fashion, they will start 
> running into collision problems much sooner than that.
It seems rather excessive to me to tell organizations such as IBM, NEC, 
JVC, MIT, JPL etc. that they can't register their name as a domain 
because in the future existing countries might want to rename / new 
ones may be formed and have ample choice of the abbreviation they get 
to use.

> Most hashing algorithms start having problems when they get close to 
> 50% full.  There's no difference here.
No, except that this isn't a hash function.

Besides, 2 character codes can easily be extended by allowing 0-9 as 
the second character, allowing for 936 combinations, which should be 
enough for a long time to come. And it's ISO's problem, not ours, 
anyway.

Just curious: does anyone know how many gb/uk-like cases there are?