Australia has its .au TLD plus .cc and .cx.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?