Comment by eloisius
4 years ago
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.
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.
I was saying the ISO 3166 is absurd, not the .tw TLD. ISO 3166 is absurd because it tacitly acknowledges that Taiwan is an independent state because it has its own record, but then parenthetically asserts that it's a province of China. Fujian isn't a top-level record of ISO 3166.
ISO codes for territories and so on exist because they're useful: different rules apply, like customs, fishing, postage, telephones, tax, residence.