Re: [ga] FYI: Future of .su

[John C Klensin <klensin@jck.com>]

--On Sunday, 20 October, 2002 13:03 -0700 Bret Fausett
<fausett@lextext.com> wrote:

> Elisabeth Porteneuve wrote:
> 
>> Besides, I recall John Klensin explaining several times that
>> country codes such as .SU or .GB will remain preserved in the
>> DNS for stability purposes.
> 
> I don't believe that's IANA's current practice:
> 
> "When an alpha-2 code for a country is changed on the ISO
> 3166-1 list, the IANA's historical practice has been to set up
> a top-level domain with the new code and to delegate it to the
> same manager as the existing top-level domain, with the
> expectation that a transition will occur and that the
> deprecated top-level domain will be deleted once the migration
> is completed."
> 
> http://www.iana.org/reports/zr-report-20jun01.htm

Bret,

I'm not in a position to comment on IANA's current practice in
this area (or in several others).  In some cases, I find those
practices obscure to the point of unfathomable.

However, note that there are two separate, and quite distinct,
things that can induce changes in the 3166-1 list (there are
others too, but I think only these are relevant to what I gather
is the question at hand):

	(1) The country changes its official or preferred name,
	requests that 3166/MA make a code change to correspond,
	and 3166/MA does that.  At least to a first-order
	approximation, national boundaries and other properties
	remain the same.
	
	(2) The country goes out of business or transforms
	itself into something else, thereby generating a new
	name for which 3166/MA is requested to assign a code.
	Political boundaries and the like usually change in this
	situation, either to expand or contract.

Now, in the first instance, the historical IANA practice has
been, I believe, to say, more or less "look, people are used to
the old code, and switching will be disruptive.  Perhaps you
would like to retain it, rather than switching, to promote
stability.  But, if you do want to switch, we will delegate the
new code to the same administration, but with the expectation
that there will be a serious effort at a rapid transition of
names out of the old code, and that we will then be able to
retire the old domain".  That model is more or less consistent
with the quotation above.   If the United Kingdom decided to
retire the .UK TLD in favor of .GB (something I wouldn't
expect), I would assume that similar rules would apply.

.SU is, by contrast, a member of the second category.  It
included, geographically and politically, a number of areas that
are now independent states and that are using their own TLDs.
That situation doesn't happen very often.  It is probably
infrequent enough that it would be hard to argue that there are
established precedents with a significant number of cases behind
them.  Automatic allocation of a new domain "to the same manager
as the existing top-level domain" may be neither feasible nor
appropriate, but, without it, it is difficult to think about how
to manage a transition without heavy-handed interference in the
local affairs of individual countries.  Remembering that
stability is almost always in the best interest of the
international internet community, it may be quite sensible to
let such domains linger for a long time while, e.g.,
discouraging new registrations in them.

regards,
     john


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