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It's odd ICANN has such a control to effect an countries income just by choosing a good abbreviation. I doubt the creators of the DNS system had any idea that d
by foxmoss 3y ago
It's odd ICANN has such a control to effect an countries income just by choosing a good abbreviation. I doubt the creators of the DNS system had any idea that domains would arbitrarily give some countries an extra form of income, profiting from people who could care less about the country it was created for. Why didn't ICANN just charge a flat fee for any string to resolve to an IP?
- Spray3610 3y agoICANN does not pick the abbreviations. ISO does.
- srhngpr 3y agoISO3166-1 alpha-2 to be exact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2
- actionfromafar 3y agoIt's odd ISO has such a control to effect an countries income just by choosing a good abbreviation. I doubt the creators of the DNS system had any idea that domains would arbitrarily give some countries an extra form of income, profiting from people who could care less about the country it was created for. Why didn't ISO just charge a flat fee for any string to resolve to an IP?
- dharmab 3y agoISO created the country codes in 1974, prior to the invention of DNS.
- pcthrowaway 3y agoSurely some of these country codes have come about after the dawn of DNS. I wonder if we'll see newly formed countries angling for names that will get valuable abbreviations
- actionfromafar 3y agoHaha, this is both informative and deadpan. Thanks. :)
- reactordev 3y agoThis is what tech debt looks like when it’s middle aged and has kids of its own.
- feelandcoffee 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sdsd 3y agoi get why people are downvoting this, because it is snarky, but i laughed so hard. so thanks for posting this, despite the hit to your internet points
- wolfgang42 3y agoThe whole point of the ccTLDs is that ICANN doesn’t really have any control over their contents—they’re “sovereign soil”, so to speak, and each country can do whatever it wants with its namespace. Which brings us to the answer to your question: > Why didn't ICANN just charge a flat fee for any string to resolve to an IP? Because ICANN doesn’t control what strings resolve! They delegate to registries (by putting NS records in the root resolvers), and for ccTLDs it’s up to each country to set policy and infrastructure to taste. If anything, the existence of gTLDs (like .com) where policy is set internationally is the unusual aspect of this arrangement.
- 8organicbits 3y agoThink about the original TLDs, there was value in separating commercial, military, and government content. Unfortunately .gov is US government only and .mil is US military only. So each country would presumably want a .gov.[country-code] and .mil.[country-code] suffixes for those same reasons (and many do). Opening up registration for non-citizens / non-residents is an option each country has. Some restrict registration more than others. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_d... There's also an important angle that countries can set the terms of service for their ccTLD to match their laws. It's one way to ensure a country has some legislative and enforcement ability over their corner of the web.