Re: CHAT: .nu domain

On Sat, 4 Sep 2004 16:18:18 -0400, John Cowan <jcowan@...> wrote:
> Indeed: Nauru is .nr.  Everything listed in ISO 3166-1 has a top-level
> domain (see http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso3166/iso3166-1-en.html
> for an unofficial but correct list).
Though for arcane reasons, the UK uses .uk and not .gb for nearly all
purposes. (The ISO 3166 code is GB, but they had UK specially reserved
for them so that no other country could use it as their ISO 3166 code
- for example, the Ukraine has UA).

There are also some top-level domains that are not in ISO-3166 as
country codes (e.g. .ac for Ascension Island or .gg for Guernsey);
apparently, most of these codes were reserved because some
organisation (e.g. UPU or ITU) needed to refer to that entity.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2 for a list of the
various codes and their statuses.

> Most countries reserve their domain for their own nationals,
And some just hold them and don't even let their nationals use them
(e.g. the moderately-famous French refusal to allocate second-level
domains beneath top-level domains such as .pm for Saint Pierre et
Miquelon or .re for Reunion Island), or hold them because there are
few or no legitimate users (as with the Norwegian-administrated .bv
for Bouvet Island and .sj for Svalbard and Jan Mayen - though they
could probably make a tidy sum from making .bv available to e.g. Dutch
companies with BV after their names, just as some German companies are
willing to pay money for an .ag Antigua and Barbuda domain).

> but some don't care who you are.
Fairly well-known examples of this include .to (nominally Tonga), .nu
(Niue), .cx (Christmas Island), .cc (Cocos/Keeling Islands), and .ws
(Samoa).

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Mind the Reply-To!