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Comment by rcbdev | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, Kosovo is in multiple organizations that fall under "UN Specialized Agencies" (IMF, World Bank, etc.) and as such should have received a ccTLD over 10-15 years ago as per the UN's rules.

Instead, they have to keep the temporarily assigned .xk which the UN confirmed can never be a permanent ccTLD.

What is going to happen to all .xk sites once the UN finally gets around to publishing the bulletin on Kosovo's country code?

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.xk does not exist. https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db

As the parent comment said, it's a temporary TLD, so by design it does not appear in the root listing. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.xk

It has never been present in the DNS root zone. A TLD that doesn't exist in the DNS is not really a TLD, is it?

wait... Did UN have rules over ccTLD? I thought ICANN is not under UN.

If I'm not mistaken, ICANN uses the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes as country TLD's, so in a sense the UN indirectly specifies the rules for ICANN. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

The UN publishes a list of recognised member states. ISO maintains a list of codes. IANA uses that list to determine whether a country code TLD is valid. But that's the extent of the UN's involvement in the governance of the root zone.

There are plenty of TLDs for areas which aren’t countries, whcih don’t claim to be counties, which nobody recognises as countries. .gg and .gu for example.

Those are not ccTLDs though.

Yes, they are.

https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/gg.html

Oh, I was wrong. My bad.

are you sure? Wikipedia describes both as being country code tlds, and both have an official ISO 3166-1 code that matches their domain.

> The IANA is not in the business of deciding what is and what is not a country. The selection of the ISO 3166 list as a basis for country code top-level domain names was made with the knowledge that ISO has a procedure for determining which entities should be and should not be on that list.

Jon Postel, RFC 1591 (Domain Name System Structure and Delegation)

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