Comment by droidist2

> China has been repeatedly affirming that the country of Taiwan is not a country

There are two countries claiming the title of "country of China", the PRC (holding the power on the mainland) and the ROC (holding the power on the island of Taiwan). Both insist there is only one "country of China", and of course both are insisting their respective regime is the one that should be governing it. None of the two suggest there is "a country of Taiwan". Indeed, the PRC "has been repeatedly affirming" that the other guys' state is "not a country, but is actually a rogue province and fully part of" themselves, but so has ROC! For the ROC, the mainland is actually a set of "rogue provinces" as well, and, somewhat amusingly, this also includes the "rogue province" known today as the country of Mongolia.

The support for two independent countries (China without Taiwan, and separately Taiwan without China) is less than non-existing on the continent (to put it mildly), but (to the best of my understanding) in the last years has some support on the island.

Plenty of territories have their own TLDs. Many islands that are integral parts of countries have their own TLD (e.g. Reunion Island in France along with most French overseas territories).

There is an 'hk' TLD and an 'mo' (macau) TLD and they don't seem to be going anywhere for the time being.

The claim that 'tw' would be removed is just unfounded conjecture or FUD in my view.

Linking a TLD's fate to ISO-3166 is already perilous for Taiwan. According to that standard, Taiwan's name is "Taiwan (Province of China)"[1]. Seems odd for one province to have it's own country-level record, while other provinces of China do not, but we all countenance the absurdity because China gonna China.

[1]: https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:code:3166:TW

The government on the island of Taiwan doesn't claim it to be a country by itself either, though.

As the remnant of the side of the civil war that lost, they call themselves the Republic of China. They claim as territory all of China and more, including parts that the PRC has since relinquished.

I'm a programmer at the Swedish Internet foundation which runs (or in industry terms: is the registry for) the .se and .nu (nuie) ccTLDs.

Basically we are a big old database. When someone registers a new domain, via a registrar, they send us that information (most commonly via a protocol called EPP). So we get "this is the domain, registered by this person, it has these hosts, it is registered for this long, with these DS posts, for example. Different registrys have different rules, for example the .se domain has a set of allowed characters that you are allowed to use in your domain name, and rules on how long into the future a domain can be registered for.

This data is then used to perform our most important job as a registry. Creating the zone file for our TLDs so that people could actually reach the domains.

That is from the technical side. There's also a big support side with different aspects. There are abuse issues that need to be taken care of, ICANN has a dispute mechanism that people are involved in.

Someone else already mentioned some of the technical aspects, but there are large customer support / contract / business relationship aspects too. You're maintaining business relationships with dozens of registrars, easily over a hundred. You're running a B2B-focused business with a large number of customers and there's random nonsense that's constantly coming up requiring human attention.

It is a political issue, not a technical issue.

It may not be. But for country level TLDs a company or organization actually manages the DNS server software - it may run "in the cloud" or not - but someone still have to mange that software and the host it runs on. (In addition to enforcing the policies and payments associated with that TLD.)

gTLDs are not ccTLDs, though. The gTLDs all run under the same standardized contract / set of rules, and if you're already running 1 then it's pretty easy to scale that to running N.

ccTLDs though are much more like special snowflakes though. There's a large difference in policies, features, technical implementations, etc., from one ccTLD to another.