[registrars] .GB v/s .UK Country code issue

["Bhavin Turakhia" <bhavin.t@directi.com>]

Hi,

there seems to be a funny discrepancy in what Afilias and Neulevel believe
is the country code for United Kingdom.

While Afilias allows "GB" but rejects "UK"
Neulevel allows "UK" and "GB"

this is causing an issue in our validation code, which validates using a
standard hash. i am wondering if a country can have two ISO codes, i was
under the assumption of the code being UK since its ccTLD is UK.

I then poke arnd on the web and find that ISO 3166 lists the code as "GB"
while IANA lists it as "UK"

http://www.din.de/gremien/nas/nabd/iso3166ma/codlstp1/en_listp1.html
http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld-whois.htm

Then i find some interesting material as to why ".uk" was requested instead
of ".gb" because UK is more inclusive than GB.

http://www.dnso.org/wgroups/wg-c/Arc01/msg00599.html

I am now changing systems to allow for .gb (since it is accepted by both). I
just hope some future registry does not decide that they wont accept GB and
will accept only UK

Best Regards
Bhavin Turakhia
CEO
Directi
----------------------------
Tel: 91-22-6370256 (4 lines)
Fax: 91-22-6370255
http://www.directi.com
----------------------------