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Comment by andyjohnson0

6 months ago

From the policy document:

"ccTLD eligibility is determined by the associated country or territory being assigned in the ISO 3166-1 standard."

So how does a country code get removed from the ISO 3166-1 list? A cursory web search wasn't very revealing.

10 comments

andyjohnson0

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gnfargbl  6 months ago

That's a very good question. I don't know; does any other HN'er?

The most information I can find is that the standard is maintained by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency [1]. Additions appear to be mostly at the direction of the United Nations [2], but I couldn't find a clear procedure as to how a country code is removed. I'm also unclear on who makes the decision to mark codes as exceptionally reserved.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166#ISO_3166_Maintenance_...

[2] https://www.iso.org/iso-3166-country-codes.html

  • andyjohnson0  6 months ago

    Perhaps the operative question is how did IO get into the ISO 3166 in the first place? My guess would be as part of the UK defensively creating the illusion of it being a legitimate territory.

WorldMaker  6 months ago

The ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency makes the changes to ISO 3166. They follow notifications from and include members from these other bodies:

    Association française de normalisation (AFNOR), France
    American National Standards Institute (ANSI), United States
    British Standards Institution (BSI), United Kingdom
    Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN), Germany
    Institut Marocain de Normalisation (IMANOR)
    Iran National Standards Organization (INSO)
    Standards Australia (SA)
    Standards Council of Canada (SCC)
    Swedish Standards Institute (SIS)
    International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
    International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)
    International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
    Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
    Universal Postal Union (UPU)
    United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE)

https://www.iso.org/iso-3166-country-codes.html

TRiG_Ireland  6 months ago

Since the list was originally developed for post, there's precedent for far-flung regions of a country to have their own codes, even when they're not considered politically separate. French Guiana, for example, is considered fully part of France, and yet it has its own code (GF).

The Chagos Archipelago is a good distance from the rest of Mauritius, and so it may perhaps retain a separate registration on the ISO list.

CalChris  6 months ago

ISO 3166-1 is maintained by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency which has members from agencies like ANSI, BSI, DIN, …. No way are they going to just let .io simply go out of existence. It's more like that Mauritius will attain ownership and then manage it similarly to other 'gTLDs'.

  .co is owned by Columbia
  .tv is owned by Tuvalu
  .me is owned by Montenegro

  • andyjohnson0  6 months ago

    .co, .tv, and .me are ccTLDs not gTLDs. They're the ISO 3166 codes for those countries.

    Some English-speaking people may treat them as global and not linked to countries, but they're not. The difference with .io is that BIOT was never a country and soon won't exist - whereas those countries have existed and will continue [1] to exist.

    [1] quite possibly with the unfortunate exception of Tuvalu