ISO 3166 namespace administration

["Cary Karp" <ck@nrm.se>]

The ISO-3166 namespace is far more heterogeneous than many
members of this list seem to realize. Administrative authority
for many of the 3166TLDs was delegated long before national
governments perceived the slightest reason either to be
interested in, or attempt to control, the process. The rules
developed and applied by the resulting domain authorities often
have significant differences. In some countries 2LD space is 
free, in others space is free first on the 3LD, or still lower. 
The extreme case is probably .US.

In some countries it is only possible to register a single 2LD
for an organization, contigent upon the presentation of proof
that the requested domain designation has an obvious
relationship to the organization's registered business name.
DNS registration may or may not be a co-requisite for the
allocation of a domain name. There may or may not be a challenge
or appeals mechanism outside of the courts. The courts may or
may not be interested in any form of involvement in the whole
thing. Where they are, there may be absolutely no precedent and
thus only a speculative basis for guessing the outcome of any
dispute.

The designation mechanisms may have been established either
initially or retrospectively by governmental contract or
legislation. Rescinding such an instrument of delegation in
order to put a national domain space under direct governmental
control, although almost always conceivable, would by no means
be a trivial matter. It makes little difference just how much
difficulty has resulted from the previous scope of governmental
participancy in the domain delegation process. The most obvious
instantiation of such difficulty is probably the NSI contract.

Yes, considering the comments quoted at the end of this message,
there is an influx of non-US organizations into .COM. There is,
however, unlikely to be a single explanation for this. Many
organizations do, indeed, find the constraints imposed by local
TLD authorities to be unaccpetable and turn to InterNIC for the
delegation. It does not follow from this that those that accept
local constraints are "happy" about doing so.

Others organizations -- in my personal guess, a very large
proportion  -- are registering in .COM for defensive purposes.
It is difficult for a non-USA based outfit, possibly already
registered as outfit.3166 to know what to do when a domain
grabber offers to sell them the rights to outfit.com.  The
savvy outfits that are targets of such offers turn to InterNIC
for relief, trademark in hand. Others simply fork over the
requested sum.

Many organizations are frightened by the publicity that such
activity is given and wish to register their own name in .COM on
a pre-emptive basis. This has, in turn, provided ISP's with a
new source of income. The fee that many charge for registering a
client in one of the three-letter domains is often a few times
the size of InterNIC's own fee. I realize that all these
concerns exist in the USA, but suspect that many of the
Stateside list members may not realize how these worries are
magnified by a distance.

Although issues of national sovereignty cannot be taken
lightly, I suspect that the IAHC may be unduly deferential to
the governments of the countries which have 3166TLD presences.
Domain management is not invariable regarded as a governmental
concern. Even where it is, there would likely be a reasonable
degree of understanding for the utility of an international
collegium of 3166TLD managers. Such a forum could provide an
internationally mandated basis for the discussion of
internationalization issues. These could cover the spectrum
from providing informed input about national considerations, to
permitting the discussion of the potential for causing egregious
linguistic offense that certain domain designations might have.

There are numerous situations where noncommercial international
collaborative ventures require formal status that cannot, or
should not, be provided in a governmental context. One way in
which this need is addressed is by the creation of
non-governmental organizations -- NGO's -- which receive their
mandate from some authorized international body. I am well aware
of the extent to which the Internet protocols have been built
upon a mistrust of "de jure" processes. Nonetheless, it might be
worth at least asking if the difficulties that led to the
creation of the IAHC suggest that there may be at least some
limit to the scope of what may be accomplished on a "de facto"
basis. One way or the other, if the discussion about finding a
formal point of genuine international anchorage for the domain
delegation process continues, I'd suspect that some form of
TLD (or Internet) NGO would sooner or later be proposed.

Has the IAHC ever discussed anything along these lines?  Even if
not the NGO aspect, what about some form of aggregation of those
who can speak authoritatively on behalf of the 3166TLDs?

The quotes that triggered the preceding verbiage:

Michael Dillon:

> Experience has shown that companies are quite happy to
> register 3LD's since many ISO3166 domains have lots of 3LD
> registrations in SLD's like co.uk, com.au, on.ca, asso.fr, and
> so on.

Simon Higgs:

> Wrong. Experience has shown that companies are forced to use
> 3LD's under ISO-3166 and they don't want to be 3LD's, so
> instead they pay InterNIC $100 for a .COM name. 600,000+
> domain names can't be wrong...

Michael Dillon:

> No, you are wrong. In just the 4 SLD's that I mentioned there
> are 54,000 organizations registered. Given a choice a
> significant number of organizations have opted to choose the
> 3LD. They just aren't as visible because they aren't all
> concentrated in one place like .COM. 



Cary Karp               Department of Information Technology
mailto:ck@nrm.se        Swedish Museum of Natural History
http://ck.nrm.se/       Svante Arrheniusv. 3
Phone: +46 8 666 4055   Box 50007
Fax:   +46 8 666 4235   104 05 Stockholm, Sweden