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Comment by the_mitsuhiko | Hacker News Reader

Though not all country codes point to a country. See .eu, .ac .su as different examples of stuff that breaks the rules.

the .su domain was made when the soviet union was still around, so that doesn't really break the rules. I would prefer for top level domains to be eternal for a great multitude of reasons

The possible annoyance with eternal country-code TLDs would be the dissolution of one country, and the creation (or renaming) of another country resulting in an eventual exhaustion of two-letter country codes. Eternity is a rather long duration.

Before exhaustion, you're likely to have new countries where they have to have suboptimal two letter codes, because a dissolved country is squating on it.

An interesting one is .uk, because the UK's country code is actually GB (the ccTLD is delegated, but unused).

And that's before we get into the really weird not-a-proper-country ones like .im or .pn.

if we run out of 2 letter TLDs, move to 3 letter ones. it really wouldn't be that hard. Also, that's assuming our current system stays in place

The country code TLDs are ISO country codes. Nothing technically requires that to continue, but if ISO re-uses a country code & ICANN doesn't, it'll get somewhat confusing.

If anyone would avoid reusing codes, it's the ISO. They love legacy compliance and compatibility (which is why I have tremendous respect for them when I'm designing software since they've certainly thought about something more than I have)

> so that doesn't really break the rules

At the time it did not break the rules. It's breaking the rules now because by the original rules it should have been phased out. What makes it survive is a special arrangement.

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