Comment by SAI_Peregrinus

12 days ago

The possible annoyance with eternal country-code TLDs would be the dissolution of one country, and the creation (or renaming) of another country resulting in an eventual exhaustion of two-letter country codes. Eternity is a rather long duration.

Before exhaustion, you're likely to have new countries where they have to have suboptimal two letter codes, because a dissolved country is squating on it.

  • An interesting one is .uk, because the UK's country code is actually GB (the ccTLD is delegated, but unused).

    And that's before we get into the really weird not-a-proper-country ones like .im or .pn.

if we run out of 2 letter TLDs, move to 3 letter ones. it really wouldn't be that hard. Also, that's assuming our current system stays in place

  • The country code TLDs are ISO country codes. Nothing technically requires that to continue, but if ISO re-uses a country code & ICANN doesn't, it'll get somewhat confusing.

    • If anyone would avoid reusing codes, it's the ISO. They love legacy compliance and compatibility (which is why I have tremendous respect for them when I'm designing software since they've certainly thought about something more than I have)