Two-letter domains are defined to be ccTLDs—if it's two letters, it's a country code domain. Breaking that rule would risk leaving a future ISO-standardized country unable to claim its domain because its code was already assigned to a tech startup gTLD.
The short-lived country of Serbia and Montenegro got assigned .cs (from Crna Gora - Srbija) which previously belonged to Czechoslovakia, but it seems it was never used (they kept using .yu).
I've heard it discussed as a possibility tho I don't personally know how the ISO CC assignment process works. On the other hand, we don't exactly create new countries at a rate that exhausting 26^2 combinations should be an issue, but I suppose that could change.
Fair enough. One could alleviate that concern by not opening gTLD for general two-letter registrations, reserving it for these special cases, but the core issue would remain.
They've done that a couple times (EU, UK, SU), but each of those was first reserved as an exception in the ISO standard. So that's probably where proponents of .io would need to start.
Two-letter domains are defined to be ccTLDs—if it's two letters, it's a country code domain. Breaking that rule would risk leaving a future ISO-standardized country unable to claim its domain because its code was already assigned to a tech startup gTLD.
Would a future ISO-standardized country get assigned a code that collides with an historical code?
The short-lived country of Serbia and Montenegro got assigned .cs (from Crna Gora - Srbija) which previously belonged to Czechoslovakia, but it seems it was never used (they kept using .yu).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.cs
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I've heard it discussed as a possibility tho I don't personally know how the ISO CC assignment process works. On the other hand, we don't exactly create new countries at a rate that exhausting 26^2 combinations should be an issue, but I suppose that could change.
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Fair enough. One could alleviate that concern by not opening gTLD for general two-letter registrations, reserving it for these special cases, but the core issue would remain.
They've done that a couple times (EU, UK, SU), but each of those was first reserved as an exception in the ISO standard. So that's probably where proponents of .io would need to start.