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Comment by foxmoss | Hacker News Reader

It's odd ICANN has such a control to effect an countries income just by choosing a good abbreviation. I doubt the creators of the DNS system had any idea that domains would arbitrarily give some countries an extra form of income, profiting from people who could care less about the country it was created for. Why didn't ICANN just charge a flat fee for any string to resolve to an IP?

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The whole point of the ccTLDs is that ICANN doesn’t really have any control over their contents—they’re “sovereign soil”, so to speak, and each country can do whatever it wants with its namespace. Which brings us to the answer to your question:

> Why didn't ICANN just charge a flat fee for any string to resolve to an IP?

Because ICANN doesn’t control what strings resolve! They delegate to registries (by putting NS records in the root resolvers), and for ccTLDs it’s up to each country to set policy and infrastructure to taste. If anything, the existence of gTLDs (like .com) where policy is set internationally is the unusual aspect of this arrangement.

ICANN does not pick the abbreviations. ISO does.

It's odd ISO has such a control to effect an countries income just by choosing a good abbreviation. I doubt the creators of the DNS system had any idea that domains would arbitrarily give some countries an extra form of income, profiting from people who could care less about the country it was created for. Why didn't ISO just charge a flat fee for any string to resolve to an IP?

ISO created the country codes in 1974, prior to the invention of DNS.

Surely some of these country codes have come about after the dawn of DNS.

I wonder if we'll see newly formed countries angling for names that will get valuable abbreviations

Haha, this is both informative and deadpan. Thanks. :)

This is what tech debt looks like when it’s middle aged and has kids of its own.

i get why people are downvoting this, because it is snarky, but i laughed so hard. so thanks for posting this, despite the hit to your internet points

ISO3166-1 alpha-2 to be exact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

Think about the original TLDs, there was value in separating commercial, military, and government content. Unfortunately .gov is US government only and .mil is US military only. So each country would presumably want a .gov.[country-code] and .mil.[country-code] suffixes for those same reasons (and many do).

Opening up registration for non-citizens / non-residents is an option each country has. Some restrict registration more than others.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_d...

There's also an important angle that countries can set the terms of service for their ccTLD to match their laws. It's one way to ensure a country has some legislative and enforcement ability over their corner of the web.

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