ICANN is finalizing a policy that will govern this question. In short, if adopted, 5-10 years after the country is removed from the ISO 3166-1 standard it will be removed as a TLD.
> There is a good faith obligation to ensure an orderly shutdown of the retiring ccTLD which takes into consideration the interests of its registrants and the stability and security of the DNS.
> The Manager of the ccTLD should be notified (Notice of Removal) that the ccTLD shall be removed from the Root Zone five years from the date of the notice.
ICANN’s lack of perspective is stunning. If I own a domain on any TLD my interest as a registrant is having that TLD around forever. I’m one of the few that thinks the new TLDs are an amazing opportunity for people to build brands and identities. I’m also never going to rely on anything but .com because I don’t trust ICANN.
ICANN is one of the most important institutions around, so it’s sad to see them working so hard for themselves and the registries while making registrars and registrants a secondary consideration (IMO).
> I’m also never going to rely on anything but .com because I don’t trust ICANN.
what's wrong with the other 2 of the "original 3" gLTDs: .net and .org?
i spent an afternoon digging into the ownership of all of this stuff, and .org felt like the safest option. .com and .net are more directly owned/operated by a US for-profit company (Verisign) who has complied with US requests to seize .com domains in the past. .org at least still has structural ties to a non-profit with chapters across the globe, even if it's incorporated in the US.
> Everyone running a high-level domain like that is essentially rent-seeking, no?
Possibly as a technical, economics definition. I'd say no because real registries are adding value. What I'd call rent-seeking here specifically is destroying the market just to increase one's share of it.
The value I see registries providing is in large-part just consistency. A .com should cost and act about the same 10 years from now as it does today. If you start exponentially increasing cost (well past inflation), you're mostly just holding everyone hostage that currently owns a domain, until everyone is priced out and the TLD is destroyed.
> there a better term for 'high-level domain'?
IMO TLD is fine for this level of conversation, I'm not 100% sure if it's technically correct or not in _all_ cases, but it gets the right idea across. A "domain registry" or just "registry" is a good term for an entity running a TLD.
They’re probably ok, but .com is massive by comparison and there’s strength in numbers. Anything shady involving the .com TLD will get immediate, large scale publicity and pushback.
> what's wrong with the other 2 of the "original 3" gLTDs: .net and .org?
I find it interesting which TLDs took off and which didn't. I see exceedingly little use the venerable of .biz and .info, for example, yet .co has seen broader adoption in a shorter time frame.
Not to be over picky, but from my first memories of the Internet at uni (1990) there were 5 tlds, in addion to the ones you mentioned were ac (academic) and gov. Both are not open to the general public though so your point stands.
A country can simply change its name without major conflict. The people still exist. Law and order never breaks down. But it becomes a "new" country.
That could result in existing TLDs going away.
One possible example would be Scotland voting to peacefully leave the UK. It's very possible the UK would change its name after that, since it's not really the union of those two kingdoms anymore.
If there's ever a need to change the British flag I hope the government takes the opportunity to incorporate the Welsh flag. It's easily the best flag in the UK if not Europe as a whole!
> One possible example would be Scotland voting to peacefully leave the UK. It's very possible the UK would change its name after that, since it's not really the union of those two kingdoms anymore.
It's the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Scotland is part of the former bit (Great Britain) alongside England and Wales.
It's a union of three kingdoms, or 2-and-a-bit kingdoms:
England and Wales (927)
+ Scotland (1707)
+ Ireland (1802)
- most of Ireland (1922), leaving only Northern Ireland
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland would probably change its name if Scotland seceded, but perhaps to the United Kingdom of England and Wales and Northern Ireland. The official ISO code (GB) would change (EI? EW?) but the reserved code (UK) need not.
Theoretically Northern Ireland could join the Republic of Ireland and Wales and Scotland could both go independent, and then it’s definitely not a United Kingdom. What happens to the millions (?) of .co.uk websites?
You can still buy Soviet Union TLDs (.su). Does this mean .su owners will lose their domains in 5-10 years? Seems like there should be some kind of grandfathering clause.
Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, USSR have all disappeared in my lifetime. Austria disappeared briefly in my grandparents’ lifetime. Somaliland’s legal existence was extinguished in ~1966 and the international community is not letting its practical existence get in the way of refusing to recognize it.
Wars of conquest, civil wars, dissolution and change happen.
ccTLDs tend to be subject to much more baroque terms. For example, restrictions on citizenship, residency, or "genuine connection", restrictions on content and speech and other legal requirements.
For example when UK left the EU then all UK registrants of .eu domains were made to relinquish them. No grandfathering. This kind of nonsense doesn't occur on .com
Yes, .eu is a ccTLD. "EU" appears in ISO 3166-1, a list of codes for countries and other geographical purposes, under the Exceptional Reservations category. TLDs in use on the basis of an entry on ISO 3166-1 are known as "country code top-level domains," even if the use of the word country is ambiguous or administratively incorrect.
For example, no one (well, perhaps we should say few) would argue that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is not a country, yet it operates ccTLD .uk which is not a country code assigned to a sovereign entity. GB is the country code for that country; UK is an exceptional reservation.
> For example when UK left the EU then all UK registrants of .eu domains were made to relinquish them. No grandfathering. This kind of nonsense doesn't occur on .com
Do you happen to have a source that supports that claim? I've registered .eu domains in the past and I never had to even offer any proof of citizenship or residency or anything of the sort. I searched for the domains, clicked on "buy", and that was that.
The parent is correct, in theory .eu requires residency or citizenship in order to register a domain[1].
After Brexit holders of .eu domains that did not meet the criteria lost their domains[2].
And the .eu is not the most restrictive ! I am a French citizen but live outside the EU, so I can't get a .fr domain (at least, again, in theory - haven't tried in practice) but I could get a .eu one.
For example .uk - If one day we decide to ditch the monarchy and become a republic I imagine this might change back to .gb
Everything would probably be grandfathered in of course being a reasonably populated TLD, and .gb would probably be wayyy less popular because it kinda sucks as a character combo, but it's a possibility.
I would say com net and org but beyond that nope dont trust it for the most part. ICANN will fuck it up in a short sided ill advised money grab eventually
More specifically, the Avangard hypersonic missile system may be just another exaggeration from the Putin regime. It is not known how reliable or precise it is, or if it actually works.
Finalizing and actually finalized are very different things in ICANN land. If they ever do try to implement this policy its likely to end up in court for years.
I know someone who recently bought a new .af domain in cash from the Taliban, in person in Kabul. The ministry of communications which controls it accepts payment by depositing cash and getting a bank draft receipt in downtown Kabul.
The previous government has definitely stopped existing, but this is the same process as before the August 2021 ghani government collapse.
Once you have your bank draft you walk it over to a clerk at the ministry of communications and within a few days somebody will hand edit the .af root zonefile.
That's interesting. Why won't the Taliban just license it, like other places do? I don't need to go to Tuvalu to buy a .tv domain. I'm guessing embargoes may play a minor role, but China still trades with them.
The taliban has generally been against opium and banned the poppy farming again as soon as they took over. Poppy farming financed the other powers, against the taliban.
I don't think that is a real concern for the Taliban.
I would rather ask: why would they? Are we expecting Taliban to consider giving out registrations? To foreigners?!
What would be their motivation to streamline this in any way at all?
Even before the government collapse the ministry of comms showed little interest in licensing it to a third party operator for widespread use. They get more revenue from a small customer prepaid credit loading tax on the four LTE/gsm/3gpp band mobile phone operators.
- Gandi : I get "Temporary error"
- Regery : Seems to allow it but I don't know how much we can trust that.
- OVH : I get "Unavailable"
- Netim : "Registrations are currently not possible."
I think it's fair to say that it's not that easy...
Why not just keep it? Most TLDs aren't even linked to a country, so if a country stops existing it would just become another TLD not linked to a country.
Someone has to assume ownership over the TLD, since ICANN’s halfway-official stance is that the country itself owns the TLD and ICANN simply acknowledges its existence. On top of that, unless it’s contracted out, the TLD registry operator is the country, so actual servers and operations would need to be taken over by another registry operator (I’m sure Google would be happy to do it).
Adding onto that, from my understanding of the political situation, China has been repeatedly affirming that the country of Taiwan is not a country, but is actually a rogue province and fully part of China. If China were to take over Taiwan, then getting rid of the .tw domain would be one of the many symbolic ways it would strip Taiwan of its status as a sovereign nation, not to mention all the other material ways they would do so. It would probably not be immediate, because in the past, the process of removing domains has involved transition periods (i.e. moving from .yu to .me and .rs).
> China has been repeatedly affirming that the country of Taiwan is not a country
There are two countries claiming the title of "country of China", the PRC (holding the power on the mainland) and the ROC (holding the power on the island of Taiwan). Both insist there is only one "country of China", and of course both are insisting their respective regime is the one that should be governing it. None of the two suggest there is "a country of Taiwan". Indeed, the PRC "has been repeatedly affirming" that the other guys' state is "not a country, but is actually a rogue province and fully part of" themselves, but so has ROC! For the ROC, the mainland is actually a set of "rogue provinces" as well, and, somewhat amusingly, this also includes the "rogue province" known today as the country of Mongolia.
The support for two independent countries (China without Taiwan, and separately Taiwan without China) is less than non-existing on the continent (to put it mildly), but (to the best of my understanding) in the last years has some support on the island.
Plenty of territories have their own TLDs. Many islands that are integral parts of countries have their own TLD (e.g. Reunion Island in France along with most French overseas territories).
There is an 'hk' TLD and an 'mo' (macau) TLD and they don't seem to be going anywhere for the time being.
The claim that 'tw' would be removed is just unfounded conjecture or FUD in my view.
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.
The government on the island of Taiwan doesn't claim it to be a country by itself either, though.
As the remnant of the side of the civil war that lost, they call themselves the Republic of China. They claim as territory all of China and more, including parts that the PRC has since relinquished.
TLDs require actual work to operate (I say this as someone responsible for running 46 TLDs). They won't just keep operating indefinitely absent an actual team responsible for running them.
I'm a programmer at the Swedish Internet foundation which runs (or in industry terms: is the registry for) the .se and .nu (nuie) ccTLDs.
Basically we are a big old database. When someone registers a new domain, via a registrar, they send us that information (most commonly via a protocol called EPP). So we get "this is the domain, registered by this person, it has these hosts, it is registered for this long, with these DS posts, for example. Different registrys have different rules, for example the .se domain has a set of allowed characters that you are allowed to use in your domain name, and rules on how long into the future a domain can be registered for.
This data is then used to perform our most important job as a registry. Creating the zone file for our TLDs so that people could actually reach the domains.
That is from the technical side. There's also a big support side with different aspects. There are abuse issues that need to be taken care of, ICANN has a dispute mechanism that people are involved in.
Someone else already mentioned some of the technical aspects, but there are large customer support / contract / business relationship aspects too. You're maintaining business relationships with dozens of registrars, easily over a hundred. You're running a B2B-focused business with a large number of customers and there's random nonsense that's constantly coming up requiring human attention.
I figured it wasn't effortless to run, but they're adding new TLDs all the time like .ninja, .wow, .xyz and are up to over 1500 different TLDs. Compared to creating a random new TLD, is keeping .tw around really such a burden if there are many websites already using it?
It may not be. But for country level TLDs a company or organization actually manages the DNS server software - it may run "in the cloud" or not - but someone still have to mange that software and the host it runs on. (In addition to enforcing the policies and payments associated with that TLD.)
gTLDs are not ccTLDs, though. The gTLDs all run under the same standardized contract / set of rules, and if you're already running 1 then it's pretty easy to scale that to running N.
ccTLDs though are much more like special snowflakes though. There's a large difference in policies, features, technical implementations, etc., from one ccTLD to another.
Curious what would happen to trendy names like “.io”. Most names are country specific, e.g. I can’t imagine people outside of Japan wanting “.jp” domain, others can transcend the country.
I remember trying to get an .an domain, but it was never possible. I think you needed an address there or something like that. (I was going for fabi.an)
Seems like the answer is that there is no answer. Everything is done on a case by case basis. The outcome of the *.hk TLD is probably the least of the Hong Kong people's concerns right now and if China have control over Hong Kong then it'll probably have control over the TLD as well.
Also, there's this:
> Based on my (admittedly cursory) scan of the Taiwan one, there’s a lot of mention about “the territory of the Governmental Authority,” which implies that if the Governmental Authority no longer has territory, things might become somewhat hairy.
Some other interesting information regarding Hong Kong, and also Macau:
1. Country calling codes: Hong Kong (+852), Macau (+853) and China (+86) are still separate;
2. Passport country code: Hong Kong and Macau passports issued before Chinese rule use HKG and MAC respectively. This is changed to match China's code, CHN, causing much confusion in customs officers in many countries unfamiliar with the situation.
3. During Japanese occupation, officials tried renaming various places in Hong Kong to Japanese names, but gave up when it brought nothing but tedious red tape.
China does not need to touch the .hk TLD, when the brand is already infiltrated and tarnished. Look at the number of totally-from-Hong-Kong companies with Hong Kong addresses, phone numbers and domain names, completely run by China-Chinese QXJZ nationals.
Went looking for a comment about this, seems like there is a Taiwan TLD[1] but that's definitely a different situation. I can't even think of a good general system for this that isn't open to one powerful country or a group of countries having control over what other areas are considered countries and which aren't. I definitely agree with the other comments about how having a TLD ultimately isn't as big a deal as the other consequences of being denied statehood though
Macau also had its own TLD (.mo) prior to the handover just like Hong Kong so I don't see why China would all of a sudden decide to prohibit the use of either (maybe when the 50 years are up!) There's no TLD for the other SARs but that's because they were never independent.
I doubt they would prohibit use. They'd just control the TLD (as they effectively already do, just more indirectly) and potentially apply different policies than are currently applied w.r.t eligibility for registration/renewal.
Yeah, that was oversight. I typed up this thing in the span of a few hours and I was so caught up with the fall of the Soviet Union that I had forgotten about Hong Kong.
I was curious about that myself, so I've updated the article with the results of some quick research.
TL;DR: in 2010 it seemed like they'd keep it, but now, China can get rid of it if they wanted, and I'm not knowledgeable enough to say whether or not they will.
AFAIK no one lost their domains when that happened. IIRC there was even an opportunity to move from a third level domain to a matching second level domain.
That’s a lot different than having a TLD disappear along with all the domains.
I think a lot migrated to second level domains. I don’t remember exactly how it worked, but third level domain owners got the first chance at the matching second level domains. There are still some on third level domains, but mostly to avoid collisions I think.
The history on why some external territories are coded is because an international standard is the basis for the two-letters used for these TLDs, and that standard is used for other purposes. Far flung localities are often coded due to things like physical mail delivery or customs boundaries which utilize the same standard.
Why does .eu exist? Essentially because "eu" was coded for the European Union to facilitate "EUR" as a currency code when the Euro was introduced. ISO 4217 currency codes derive from ISO 3166 country codes.
At this point the reason to allow them is because they already did and they shouldn’t break links unnecessarily. I guess another reason is because they allow nonsense like .google now so what’s the actual harm in a country having two or three?
Google uses theirs (.google, .goog, .gle, .youtube) both for public and infrastructure stuff. Same with AWS (.aws).
For things like `pki.goog` or `ecr.aws` I think it makes a lot of sense; compared to an equivalent .com domain it removes the Verisign dependency from the DNS resolution chain.
They are rarely seen, as many consumers don't identify them as domains. People understand the meaning of "example.com" in an ad or something. Thus companies are reluctant to put their primary site to not established TLDs.
Companies also always "need" the .com (and country, TLD) as people will always try companyname.com.
New TLDs work for some people's blogs, some places with more technical audience or specific marketing campaigns.
.cx has ...interesting... internet historical considerations though.
But, for example, .gl and .fo also exist despite being part of Denmark (yes, it's complicated). Presumably those Australian territories have some level of jurisdiction over their telecommunications.
Originally a list of two letter country and territory codes was simply used. IIRC this was before ICANN was even constituted. I think it jon postel might simply have typed in the names.
Until recently, .SU had very little to with “Russian government”. Its Wikipedia article is a kitchen sink of useless facts which gave the post author the false sense he knows something about the topic.
SU TLD was given to Soviet Unix Users Group when Demos/Relcom (mostly the same people forming SUUG, regarded as first internet provider in USSR) joined the EUNet. Some relevant discussion can probably be found in old Usenet posts. At the time, finding someone in Soviet — and, shortly afterwards, Russian — government who understood what a domain name was would be a miracle. Further Internet-related committees and legal entities would be formed in the '90s by people from that tech circle.
I suppose the combination of personal contacts between people who created current Internet management organizations, inertia, long growth and transfer period of RU, and probably a convenience of making some money from yearly registration fees resulted in endless deprecated-but-active-in-all-regards state. It seems to me that making everyone using it move because of some formal decision would be as abrupt as making most of .com/.net/.org users move to specific country TLDs which they should formally use. Given how many crapTLDs have been created recently, its notability seems to dwindle.
Fun fact: IANA got 3 applications for RU TLD at the same time: one from Demos, one from Relcom, and one from Russian Academy of Sciences. It took 3 years for all participants to agree and form a non-commercial entity, RIPN, which finally got the domain.
Hacker news commentations are usually more interesting and insightful than you're average article on the internet that garners enough SEO to be posted here. So, let's not pretend otherwise. Many of us, just read the comments here and only read the article if it has earned our attention.
I was little confused why some countries were included but not others. So it's clear why in addition to .su (split up) you'd be interested in .dd (ceased to exist after German Reunification) .cs (split into two countries) and .yu (inherited then later renamed)
But I was wondering why .pl was included but not .ro or .bg - after all Romania and Bulgaria were also in Warsaw Pact and had overthrown their USSR-backed communist governments. The reason is simple, apparently these ccTLDs just didn't exist before then - .ro was created in 1993 and .bg in 1995.
Technically it would be simple, they'd just need to add a lookup to their database before doing regular DNS lookup.
Back in the 90s AOL did similar with their browser and it was fairly common to see companies list their AOL Keyword in advertising.
I think it's unlikely to happen too soon though as they generally own the search box in chrome and can autosuggest whatever they want when you enter a term anyway which is probably the contemporary equivalent anyway.
There are various fake crypto/blockchain-related fake TLDs you can add to your browser through browser extensions, but the risk of future name collisions is very real. And a domain name that doesn't even work in other browsers isn't useful at all. Having something as basic as "Share URL" not work results in a fundamentally broken (and bad) user experience.
This would not be a concern because Chrome has a massive install base. Similar to .onion, no one would register or potentially be able to register the one Google would adopt.
> because of this grayness and lax and outdated terms of use, it’s host to lots of cool sites such as white supremacist site Daily Stormer (to escape deplatforming on literally everywhere else), cybercrime activities, the pro-Putin youth movement Nashi up until 2019, the Dontesk People’s Republic, and more.
https://www.icann.org/en/announcements/details/ccnso-propose...