Comment by judge2020
4 years ago
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).
> 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
For some reason, almost all of French overseas départements and territories have ccTLDs even though they're not really used (sometimes by local administration or for locally relevant websites, but regular people just use .fr). They can be used by any French or EU citizen since they are in effect just additional ccTLDs of France. There are 12 of them I think, while the 97 other départements don't have their own ccTLD. I have no idea how this situation happened since most of these places were never countries at all or anything remotely close to it (New Caledonia and French Polynesia are the two that do make sense).
It's a bit weird but it shows that Taiwan's situation isn't that special regarding TLDs.
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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.