Perhaps definitions are in order...

[Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>]

After some discussions with Jon Postel I have revised the ISO3166
definition to replace this sentence:

               After the initial delegation they are no
               longer subject to the control of IANA or the international
               Internet community.

It appears that this is more or less folklore. I have a somewhat more
accurate version below and a few typos and other errors corrected.

Perhaps definitions are in order...

TLD - Top Level Domain. This is the righmost suffix found on Internet
      domain names, i.e. .COM, .UK and so on. 

iTLD - International TLD. This is a TLD that is open to domain name
       registrations from any country. Currently this list includes
       .COM, .ORG, .NET, .EDU and .INT. Note that .EDU is restricted to 
       degree granting institutions and .INT is in the process of 
       being transferred to ITU-T where it will be managed according
       to the standard X.666.  http://www.itu.int/intreg/x666.html 

ISO 3166 TLD - these are the two letter TLD's that are delegated to the
               control of a national organization in each individual 
               country. IANA encourages people within each country to manage 
               these domains independently but does advise and assist the 
               national managers of ISO3166 domains and reserves the right 
               to withdraw the delegation. The name refers to the two character
               ISO 3166 country codes, as used by the Universal Postal Union,
               that form these TLD's.

legacy TLD - there are two legacy TLD's, .MIL and .GOV that are delegated
             to the control of the US government and US DOD due to
             the history of the Internet. 

.ARPA - This TLD was historically used by the US DOD's ARPA project and
        is now only used for the in-addr.arpa database which provides
        reverse DNS lookups to translate an IP address into an FQDN
        (Fully Qualified Domain Name).


Michael Dillon                   -               ISP & Internet Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael@memra.com