Doug Barton writes: > I don't doubt Jaap.
Thank you. > What I doubt is that any organization as political > as ISO (or ICANN) will hold preferences stable in the absence of a > controlling policy. Here are some more facts from the trivia corner. The ISO was started from 1947. The first edition of the 3166 standard is from 1974 and defined the User assigned codes as: The series of letters AA, XA to XZ, and ZZ, and the series AAA to AAZ, XAA to XZZ and ZZA to ZZZ respectively, are available for private use, and for provisional codes which should be recorded as soon as possible by the maintenance agency. An existing alpha-1 code which is in agreement with the first letter of the alpha-2 code may be used for an appropriate time to be fixed by the agency. The second edition (1981) said: The series of letters AA, OM to QZ,XA to XZ, and ZZ,and the series AAA to AAZ, QMA to QZZ, XAA to XZZ, and ZZA to ZZZ respectively and the series of numbers 900 to 999, are available for individual use. so it did add the ranges starting with a Q. The later editions are all defining the same name space (with sometimes different wording). A similar exercise can be done for ICANN en TLD name space but I leave that up to the reader(s). However, I cannot help noticing that for years I hear from various ICANN stakeholders that ICANN should start to use alpha-2 codes as well. Most recently in the meetings of the GNSO newgtld working group, subgroup wt-5. The motivation is that then Volkswagen can have its TLD ".vw" and the Bank of America (why not bank of Albania?) ".ba". jaap PS. [Apparently proponents of ba for a bank don't realize that it is assigned to Bosnia and Herzegovina]. _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list DNSOP@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop