Comment by chrismorgan
7 months ago
They could certainly say “we’re giving up on alpha-2 codes, new countries only get alpha-3 codes”. But it’d be rather difficult, as there’s a lot of software using alpha-2 codes. I imagine ISO and ICANN would talk, and maybe ISO 3166/MA would reserve any extant three-letter TLDs, so ICANN say “no new three-letter TLDs except for new countries”. That’d solve the issue entirely.
Agreed. It's important to bear in mind that DNS is one thing that uses ISO3166, but by no means the only thing.