What happens to TLDs when their country stops existing?
astrid.tech
astrid.tech
https://www.icann.org/en/announcements/details/ccnso-propose...
> The Manager of the ccTLD should be notified (Notice of Removal) that the ccTLD shall be removed from the Root Zone five years from the date of the notice.
ICANN’s lack of perspective is stunning. If I own a domain on any TLD my interest as a registrant is having that TLD around forever. I’m one of the few that thinks the new TLDs are an amazing opportunity for people to build brands and identities. I’m also never going to rely on anything but .com because I don’t trust ICANN.
ICANN is one of the most important institutions around, so it’s sad to see them working so hard for themselves and the registries while making registrars and registrants a secondary consideration (IMO).
For example when UK left the EU then all UK registrants of .eu domains were made to relinquish them. No grandfathering. This kind of nonsense doesn't occur on .com
For example, no one (well, perhaps we should say few) would argue that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is not a country, yet it operates ccTLD .uk which is not a country code assigned to a sovereign entity. GB is the country code for that country; UK is an exceptional reservation.
Do you happen to have a source that supports that claim? I've registered .eu domains in the past and I never had to even offer any proof of citizenship or residency or anything of the sort. I searched for the domains, clicked on "buy", and that was that.
And the .eu is not the most restrictive ! I am a French citizen but live outside the EU, so I can't get a .fr domain (at least, again, in theory - haven't tried in practice) but I could get a .eu one.
[1]: https://eurid.eu/en/register-a-eu-domain/rules-for-eu-domain...
[2]: https://eurid.eu/en/register-a-eu-domain/brexit-notice/
Wars of conquest, civil wars, dissolution and change happen.
That could result in existing TLDs going away.
One possible example would be Scotland voting to peacefully leave the UK. It's very possible the UK would change its name after that, since it's not really the union of those two kingdoms anymore.
It's the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Scotland is part of the former bit (Great Britain) alongside England and Wales.
England and Wales (927)
+ Scotland (1707)
+ Ireland (1802)
- most of Ireland (1922), leaving only Northern Ireland
For example .uk - If one day we decide to ditch the monarchy and become a republic I imagine this might change back to .gb
Everything would probably be grandfathered in of course being a reasonably populated TLD, and .gb would probably be wayyy less popular because it kinda sucks as a character combo, but it's a possibility.
what's wrong with the other 2 of the "original 3" gLTDs: .net and .org?
i spent an afternoon digging into the ownership of all of this stuff, and .org felt like the safest option. .com and .net are more directly owned/operated by a US for-profit company (Verisign) who has complied with US requests to seize .com domains in the past. .org at least still has structural ties to a non-profit with chapters across the globe, even if it's incorporated in the US.
(Is there a better term for 'high-level domain'? It doesn't necessarily have to be a TLD after all.)
Possibly as a technical, economics definition. I'd say no because real registries are adding value. What I'd call rent-seeking here specifically is destroying the market just to increase one's share of it.
The value I see registries providing is in large-part just consistency. A .com should cost and act about the same 10 years from now as it does today. If you start exponentially increasing cost (well past inflation), you're mostly just holding everyone hostage that currently owns a domain, until everyone is priced out and the TLD is destroyed.
> there a better term for 'high-level domain'?
IMO TLD is fine for this level of conversation, I'm not 100% sure if it's technically correct or not in _all_ cases, but it gets the right idea across. A "domain registry" or just "registry" is a good term for an entity running a TLD.
Wasn’t it .edu for education? .ac is the ccTLD of the Ascension Island.
.mil was there from the beginning IIRC. And .int came not much later.
I find it interesting which TLDs took off and which didn't. I see exceedingly little use the venerable of .biz and .info, for example, yet .co has seen broader adoption in a shorter time frame.
I can't see Afilias just rolling over when .io (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory) ends up needing to be removed.
The previous government has definitely stopped existing, but this is the same process as before the August 2021 ghani government collapse.
Once you have your bank draft you walk it over to a clerk at the ministry of communications and within a few days somebody will hand edit the .af root zonefile.
I would rather ask: why would they? Are we expecting Taliban to consider giving out registrations? To foreigners?! What would be their motivation to streamline this in any way at all?
Do we assume that they even care?
- Gandi : I get "Temporary error" - Regery : Seems to allow it but I don't know how much we can trust that. - OVH : I get "Unavailable" - Netim : "Registrations are currently not possible."
I think it's fair to say that it's not that easy...
It's a bit weird but it shows that Taiwan's situation isn't that special regarding TLDs.
As the remnant of the side of the civil war that lost, they call themselves the Republic of China. They claim as territory all of China and more, including parts that the PRC has since relinquished.
There is an 'hk' TLD and an 'mo' (macau) TLD and they don't seem to be going anywhere for the time being.
The claim that 'tw' would be removed is just unfounded conjecture or FUD in my view.
There are two countries claiming the title of "country of China", the PRC (holding the power on the mainland) and the ROC (holding the power on the island of Taiwan). Both insist there is only one "country of China", and of course both are insisting their respective regime is the one that should be governing it. None of the two suggest there is "a country of Taiwan". Indeed, the PRC "has been repeatedly affirming" that the other guys' state is "not a country, but is actually a rogue province and fully part of" themselves, but so has ROC! For the ROC, the mainland is actually a set of "rogue provinces" as well, and, somewhat amusingly, this also includes the "rogue province" known today as the country of Mongolia.
The support for two independent countries (China without Taiwan, and separately Taiwan without China) is less than non-existing on the continent (to put it mildly), but (to the best of my understanding) in the last years has some support on the island.
Basically we are a big old database. When someone registers a new domain, via a registrar, they send us that information (most commonly via a protocol called EPP). So we get "this is the domain, registered by this person, it has these hosts, it is registered for this long, with these DS posts, for example. Different registrys have different rules, for example the .se domain has a set of allowed characters that you are allowed to use in your domain name, and rules on how long into the future a domain can be registered for.
This data is then used to perform our most important job as a registry. Creating the zone file for our TLDs so that people could actually reach the domains.
That is from the technical side. There's also a big support side with different aspects. There are abuse issues that need to be taken care of, ICANN has a dispute mechanism that people are involved in.
ccTLDs though are much more like special snowflakes though. There's a large difference in policies, features, technical implementations, etc., from one ccTLD to another.
Also, there's this:
> Based on my (admittedly cursory) scan of the Taiwan one, there’s a lot of mention about “the territory of the Governmental Authority,” which implies that if the Governmental Authority no longer has territory, things might become somewhat hairy.
It's Chinese territory. They have 100% control.
[1]: https://www.icann.org/en/announcements/details/twtaiwan-comp...
TL;DR: in 2010 it seemed like they'd keep it, but now, China can get rid of it if they wanted, and I'm not knowledgeable enough to say whether or not they will.
1. Country calling codes: Hong Kong (+852), Macau (+853) and China (+86) are still separate;
2. Passport country code: Hong Kong and Macau passports issued before Chinese rule use HKG and MAC respectively. This is changed to match China's code, CHN, causing much confusion in customs officers in many countries unfamiliar with the situation.
3. During Japanese occupation, officials tried renaming various places in Hong Kong to Japanese names, but gave up when it brought nothing but tedious red tape.
China does not need to touch the .hk TLD, when the brand is already infiltrated and tarnished. Look at the number of totally-from-Hong-Kong companies with Hong Kong addresses, phone numbers and domain names, completely run by China-Chinese QXJZ nationals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.qc.ca#Third-level_(provincial...
That’s a lot different than having a TLD disappear along with all the domains.
It’s pretty hard to see what benefit these TLDs have to these Australian external territories and if ICANN should even allow them to exist.
For things like `pki.goog` or `ecr.aws` I think it makes a lot of sense; compared to an equivalent .com domain it removes the Verisign dependency from the DNS resolution chain.
Companies also always "need" the .com (and country, TLD) as people will always try companyname.com.
New TLDs work for some people's blogs, some places with more technical audience or specific marketing campaigns.
The history on why some external territories are coded is because an international standard is the basis for the two-letters used for these TLDs, and that standard is used for other purposes. Far flung localities are often coded due to things like physical mail delivery or customs boundaries which utilize the same standard.
Why does .eu exist? Essentially because "eu" was coded for the European Union to facilitate "EUR" as a currency code when the Euro was introduced. ISO 4217 currency codes derive from ISO 3166 country codes.
But, for example, .gl and .fo also exist despite being part of Denmark (yes, it's complicated). Presumably those Australian territories have some level of jurisdiction over their telecommunications.
Why should ICANN have a say? Isn't it enough that a country wishes to put in the work to manage their ccTLDs?
SU TLD was given to Soviet Unix Users Group when Demos/Relcom (mostly the same people forming SUUG, regarded as first internet provider in USSR) joined the EUNet. Some relevant discussion can probably be found in old Usenet posts. At the time, finding someone in Soviet — and, shortly afterwards, Russian — government who understood what a domain name was would be a miracle. Further Internet-related committees and legal entities would be formed in the '90s by people from that tech circle.
I suppose the combination of personal contacts between people who created current Internet management organizations, inertia, long growth and transfer period of RU, and probably a convenience of making some money from yearly registration fees resulted in endless deprecated-but-active-in-all-regards state. It seems to me that making everyone using it move because of some formal decision would be as abrupt as making most of .com/.net/.org users move to specific country TLDs which they should formally use. Given how many crapTLDs have been created recently, its notability seems to dwindle.
> to escape deplatforming on literally everywhere else
But I was wondering why .pl was included but not .ro or .bg - after all Romania and Bulgaria were also in Warsaw Pact and had overthrown their USSR-backed communist governments. The reason is simple, apparently these ccTLDs just didn't exist before then - .ro was created in 1993 and .bg in 1995.
Every day's a school day :)
There are various fake crypto/blockchain-related fake TLDs you can add to your browser through browser extensions, but the risk of future name collisions is very real. And a domain name that doesn't even work in other browsers isn't useful at all. Having something as basic as "Share URL" not work results in a fundamentally broken (and bad) user experience.
This would not be a concern because Chrome has a massive install base. Similar to .onion, no one would register or potentially be able to register the one Google would adopt.
Back in the 90s AOL did similar with their browser and it was fairly common to see companies list their AOL Keyword in advertising.
I think it's unlikely to happen too soon though as they generally own the search box in chrome and can autosuggest whatever they want when you enter a term anyway which is probably the contemporary equivalent anyway.
cool sites?