ICANN is finalizing a policy that will govern this question. In short, if adopted, 5-10 years after the country is removed from the ISO 3166-1 standard it will be removed as a TLD.
> There is a good faith obligation to ensure an orderly shutdown of the retiring ccTLD which takes into consideration the interests of its registrants and the stability and security of the DNS.
> 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).
> I’m also never going to rely on anything but .com because I don’t trust ICANN.
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.
I would say com net and org but beyond that nope dont trust it for the most part. ICANN will fuck it up in a short sided ill advised money grab eventually
Finalizing and actually finalized are very different things in ICANN land. If they ever do try to implement this policy its likely to end up in court for years.
I know someone who recently bought a new .af domain in cash from the Taliban, in person in Kabul. The ministry of communications which controls it accepts payment by depositing cash and getting a bank draft receipt in downtown Kabul.
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.
That's interesting. Why won't the Taliban just license it, like other places do? I don't need to go to Tuvalu to buy a .tv domain. I'm guessing embargoes may play a minor role, but China still trades with them.
Even before the government collapse the ministry of comms showed little interest in licensing it to a third party operator for widespread use. They get more revenue from a small customer prepaid credit loading tax on the four LTE/gsm/3gpp band mobile phone operators.
- 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...
Why not just keep it? Most TLDs aren't even linked to a country, so if a country stops existing it would just become another TLD not linked to a country.
Someone has to assume ownership over the TLD, since ICANN’s halfway-official stance is that the country itself owns the TLD and ICANN simply acknowledges its existence. On top of that, unless it’s contracted out, the TLD registry operator is the country, so actual servers and operations would need to be taken over by another registry operator (I’m sure Google would be happy to do it).
Adding onto that, from my understanding of the political situation, China has been repeatedly affirming that the country of Taiwan is not a country, but is actually a rogue province and fully part of China. If China were to take over Taiwan, then getting rid of the .tw domain would be one of the many symbolic ways it would strip Taiwan of its status as a sovereign nation, not to mention all the other material ways they would do so. It would probably not be immediate, because in the past, the process of removing domains has involved transition periods (i.e. moving from .yu to .me and .rs).
TLDs require actual work to operate (I say this as someone responsible for running 46 TLDs). They won't just keep operating indefinitely absent an actual team responsible for running them.
I figured it wasn't effortless to run, but they're adding new TLDs all the time like .ninja, .wow, .xyz and are up to over 1500 different TLDs. Compared to creating a random new TLD, is keeping .tw around really such a burden if there are many websites already using it?
Curious what would happen to trendy names like “.io”. Most names are country specific, e.g. I can’t imagine people outside of Japan wanting “.jp” domain, others can transcend the country.
I remember trying to get an .an domain, but it was never possible. I think you needed an address there or something like that. (I was going for fabi.an)
Seems like the answer is that there is no answer. Everything is done on a case by case basis. The outcome of the *.hk TLD is probably the least of the Hong Kong people's concerns right now and if China have control over Hong Kong then it'll probably have control over the TLD as well.
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.
Some other interesting information regarding Hong Kong, and also Macau:
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.
Went looking for a comment about this, seems like there is a Taiwan TLD[1] but that's definitely a different situation. I can't even think of a good general system for this that isn't open to one powerful country or a group of countries having control over what other areas are considered countries and which aren't. I definitely agree with the other comments about how having a TLD ultimately isn't as big a deal as the other consequences of being denied statehood though
Macau also had its own TLD (.mo) prior to the handover just like Hong Kong so I don't see why China would all of a sudden decide to prohibit the use of either (maybe when the 50 years are up!) There's no TLD for the other SARs but that's because they were never independent.
I doubt they would prohibit use. They'd just control the TLD (as they effectively already do, just more indirectly) and potentially apply different policies than are currently applied w.r.t eligibility for registration/renewal.
Yeah, that was oversight. I typed up this thing in the span of a few hours and I was so caught up with the fall of the Soviet Union that I had forgotten about Hong Kong.
I was curious about that myself, so I've updated the article with the results of some quick research.
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.
AFAIK no one lost their domains when that happened. IIRC there was even an opportunity to move from a third level domain to a matching second level domain.
That’s a lot different than having a TLD disappear along with all the domains.
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.
At this point the reason to allow them is because they already did and they shouldn’t break links unnecessarily. I guess another reason is because they allow nonsense like .google now so what’s the actual harm in a country having two or three?
.cx has ...interesting... internet historical considerations though.
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.
Originally a list of two letter country and territory codes was simply used. IIRC this was before ICANN was even constituted. I think it jon postel might simply have typed in the names.
Until recently, .SU had very little to with “Russian government”. Its Wikipedia article is a kitchen sink of useless facts which gave the post author the false sense he knows something about the topic.
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.
Fun fact: IANA got 3 applications for RU TLD at the same time: one from Demos, one from Relcom, and one from Russian Academy of Sciences. It took 3 years for all participants to agree and form a non-commercial entity, RIPN, which finally got the domain.
I was little confused why some countries were included but not others. So it's clear why in addition to .su (split up) you'd be interested in .dd (ceased to exist after German Reunification) .cs (split into two countries) and .yu (inherited then later renamed)
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.
Technically it would be simple, they'd just need to add a lookup to their database before doing regular DNS lookup.
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.
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.
> because of this grayness and lax and outdated terms of use, it’s host to lots of cool sites such as white supremacist site Daily Stormer (to escape deplatforming on literally everywhere else), cybercrime activities, the pro-Putin youth movement Nashi up until 2019, the Dontesk People’s Republic, and more.
ICANN is finalizing a policy that will govern this question. In short, if adopted, 5-10 years after the country is removed from the ISO 3166-1 standard it will be removed as a TLD.
https://www.icann.org/en/announcements/details/ccnso-propose...
> There is a good faith obligation to ensure an orderly shutdown of the retiring ccTLD which takes into consideration the interests of its registrants and the stability and security of the DNS.
> 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).
> I’m also never going to rely on anything but .com because I don’t trust ICANN.
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.
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Do you trust your country to continue existing? I do.
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I would say com net and org but beyond that nope dont trust it for the most part. ICANN will fuck it up in a short sided ill advised money grab eventually
Something like this could fork the internet dns into multiple versions
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What will happen to .su? (Soviet union)
It all depends on the war. If Russia can defeat the NATO then .su might be useful again.. ;)
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Are there any active .su domains?
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Finalizing and actually finalized are very different things in ICANN land. If they ever do try to implement this policy its likely to end up in court for years.
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.
I know someone who recently bought a new .af domain in cash from the Taliban, in person in Kabul. The ministry of communications which controls it accepts payment by depositing cash and getting a bank draft receipt in downtown Kabul.
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.
That's interesting. Why won't the Taliban just license it, like other places do? I don't need to go to Tuvalu to buy a .tv domain. I'm guessing embargoes may play a minor role, but China still trades with them.
Maybe they don't want people using it as an abbreviation for As Fuck. high.af
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Even before the government collapse the ministry of comms showed little interest in licensing it to a third party operator for widespread use. They get more revenue from a small customer prepaid credit loading tax on the four LTE/gsm/3gpp band mobile phone operators.
it doesn't (or didn't) seem necessary to actually go over there for registrations? https://tld-list.com/tld/af
I just tried on a few:
- 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...
Why not just keep it? Most TLDs aren't even linked to a country, so if a country stops existing it would just become another TLD not linked to a country.
Someone has to assume ownership over the TLD, since ICANN’s halfway-official stance is that the country itself owns the TLD and ICANN simply acknowledges its existence. On top of that, unless it’s contracted out, the TLD registry operator is the country, so actual servers and operations would need to be taken over by another registry operator (I’m sure Google would be happy to do it).
Adding onto that, from my understanding of the political situation, China has been repeatedly affirming that the country of Taiwan is not a country, but is actually a rogue province and fully part of China. If China were to take over Taiwan, then getting rid of the .tw domain would be one of the many symbolic ways it would strip Taiwan of its status as a sovereign nation, not to mention all the other material ways they would do so. It would probably not be immediate, because in the past, the process of removing domains has involved transition periods (i.e. moving from .yu to .me and .rs).
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TLDs require actual work to operate (I say this as someone responsible for running 46 TLDs). They won't just keep operating indefinitely absent an actual team responsible for running them.
I am very curious - can you briefly summarize what activities are performed when one is "running a TLD"?
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I figured it wasn't effortless to run, but they're adding new TLDs all the time like .ninja, .wow, .xyz and are up to over 1500 different TLDs. Compared to creating a random new TLD, is keeping .tw around really such a burden if there are many websites already using it?
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Why is it more work to operate two small TLDs than one large one? If the total number of domains is the same?
A TLD is a money tree, people would be lining up to run it.
Curious what would happen to trendy names like “.io”. Most names are country specific, e.g. I can’t imagine people outside of Japan wanting “.jp” domain, others can transcend the country.
See https://techcrunch.com/2010/10/06/trouble-in-clever-domain-l...
I'm not sure you read the article, as all that journalism points out hackernews as the source.
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When the Netherlands Antilles was disolved in 2010, the .an TLD was phased out.
I remember trying to get an .an domain, but it was never possible. I think you needed an address there or something like that. (I was going for fabi.an)
Was it replaced by a TLD for the individual islands?
Yes, by .BQ, .CW, and .SX: https://www.iso.org/files/live/sites/isoorg/files/archive/pd...
An interesting question the article doesn’t address is the current state and fate of *.hk
Seems like the answer is that there is no answer. Everything is done on a case by case basis. The outcome of the *.hk TLD is probably the least of the Hong Kong people's concerns right now and if China have control over Hong Kong then it'll probably have control over the TLD as well.
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.
> if China have control over Hong Kong
It's Chinese territory. They have 100% control.
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Some other interesting information regarding Hong Kong, and also Macau:
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.
Went looking for a comment about this, seems like there is a Taiwan TLD[1] but that's definitely a different situation. I can't even think of a good general system for this that isn't open to one powerful country or a group of countries having control over what other areas are considered countries and which aren't. I definitely agree with the other comments about how having a TLD ultimately isn't as big a deal as the other consequences of being denied statehood though
[1]: https://www.icann.org/en/announcements/details/twtaiwan-comp...
Macau also had its own TLD (.mo) prior to the handover just like Hong Kong so I don't see why China would all of a sudden decide to prohibit the use of either (maybe when the 50 years are up!) There's no TLD for the other SARs but that's because they were never independent.
I doubt they would prohibit use. They'd just control the TLD (as they effectively already do, just more indirectly) and potentially apply different policies than are currently applied w.r.t eligibility for registration/renewal.
So long as Hong Kong is not a normal Chinese city, but a quasi-state, it will keep needing its own country code and keep the TLD.
Considering how it acknowledges Taiwan I think we can safely attribute that to oversight rather than malice.
Yeah, that was oversight. I typed up this thing in the span of a few hours and I was so caught up with the fall of the Soviet Union that I had forgotten about Hong Kong.
I was curious about that myself, so I've updated the article with the results of some quick research.
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.
A similar situation happened with Canada's third-level domains:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.qc.ca#Third-level_(provincial...
AFAIK no one lost their domains when that happened. IIRC there was even an opportunity to move from a third level domain to a matching second level domain.
That’s a lot different than having a TLD disappear along with all the domains.
I don't see any of those domains today so I assume they were asked to migrate somehow?
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Didn't the US have a domain format like this, I seem to remember it being cited as a reason that .com became the default for US businesses.
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.
... and .hm and .nf.
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.
At this point the reason to allow them is because they already did and they shouldn’t break links unnecessarily. I guess another reason is because they allow nonsense like .google now so what’s the actual harm in a country having two or three?
in practice does anyone actually use the generic tld's? i know many big companies splurged large amounts of money on them but i never see any of them.
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.cx has ...interesting... internet historical considerations though.
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.
> 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.
Why should ICANN have a say? Isn't it enough that a country wishes to put in the work to manage their ccTLDs?
Originally a list of two letter country and territory codes was simply used. IIRC this was before ICANN was even constituted. I think it jon postel might simply have typed in the names.
Until recently, .SU had very little to with “Russian government”. Its Wikipedia article is a kitchen sink of useless facts which gave the post author the false sense he knows something about the topic.
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.
Fun fact: IANA got 3 applications for RU TLD at the same time: one from Demos, one from Relcom, and one from Russian Academy of Sciences. It took 3 years for all participants to agree and form a non-commercial entity, RIPN, which finally got the domain.
.SU is still the soviet union, if memory serves. Those sites are still in operation.
I’m just now noticing that, quite fittingly for the time, .SU is .US reversed.
And they mean pretty much the same thing.
The article does not explain why .su seems to be popular among white supremacy sites.
It does mention a possible reason:
> to escape deplatforming on literally everywhere else
Not sure why you're downvoted. This seems correct, and interesting.
It’s the very first example in the article.
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I was little confused why some countries were included but not others. So it's clear why in addition to .su (split up) you'd be interested in .dd (ceased to exist after German Reunification) .cs (split into two countries) and .yu (inherited then later renamed)
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 :)
Is there anything stopping Google from just making up their own TLDs for their browser?
Technically it would be simple, they'd just need to add a lookup to their database before doing regular DNS lookup.
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.
Name collisions.
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.
>Name collisions.
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.
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There's a short documentary about the .yu domain and the women who administered it.
https://vimeo.com/95833310
> because of this grayness and lax and outdated terms of use, it’s host to lots of cool sites such as white supremacist site Daily Stormer (to escape deplatforming on literally everywhere else), cybercrime activities, the pro-Putin youth movement Nashi up until 2019, the Dontesk People’s Republic, and more.
cool sites?
Yeah, even if sarcastic, not cool
It's fairly obvious to me that it was sarcasm.
Those two words are at the beginning of the quote. Maybe the author was looking for "eccentric" or "unusual"?