[ga] Re: is ICANN or is ICANN not?

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@xxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 02:36:42PM -0800,
 Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote 
 a message of 35 lines which said:

> ICANN should strive to insulate itself from the political aspect of
> recognizing what is and what is not chunk of national sovereignty.

OK (see RFC 1591 for details), but it is easier said than done. AFAIK,
there is only one place to find lists of countries, ISO 3166-1 and it
clearly has a different set of requirments from what the Internet
expects:

- it is only ASCII and does not include Unicode names or abreviations,
so it does not help for IDN in the root,

- it is not stable: ISO 3166-1 is a snapshot of the current reality,
so you cannot use it for identifiers which need long term stability,
like domain names,

- it is not freely available (*one* of the lists, alpha-2, is on the
Web site of the Maintenance Agency, but not the standard). See
http://www.iso.org/iso/fr/prods-services/iso3166ma/05database/index.html
(the prizes are in Swiss Francs).

(Since the standard is not public, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166 for details.)

So, blindly using ISO 3166-1 is a recipe for problems. We should
instead focus on precise rules about how we can deviate from it. RFC
4646 is a nice example, for instance, that we could use for
inspiration.

> For ICANN do to other than to follow, exactly, what is in the
> appropriate ISO list (3166-1?)

Remember that ISO 3166-1 is not a list: it is a set of lists. I've
never seen (for instance, it is not in ICP-1) a text saying *which*
lists in ISO 3166-1 are eligible.

".su" is in ISO 3166-1 (see
http://www.iso.org/iso/fr/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code-lists/iso_3166-1_decoding_table.html).
So is ".840" that the US governement should claim for itself. (And
".250" for us.)

And, by the way, ".com" is in ISO 3166-1, and therefore should be
immediately redelegated to its legitimate holder, the governement of
Comores.

> Else ICANN ought to be very frank and say that it uses the ISO lists
> merely as suggestions.

Between "blindly following a standard which is not even publicly
available" and "using it only as suggestion", there are many options.