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Use of Country and Territory Names as Top-Level Domains

COMMENT

Main penholder: Maureen Hilyard

In consultation with: Cheryl Langdon-Orr

  TBCTBCTBC
Glen de Saint Géry Glen@icann.org
Lars Hoffmann lars.hoffmann@icann.org
TBC

For information about this Public Comment, please click here 

 

FINAL VERSION TO BE SUBMITTED IF RATIFIED

The final version to be submitted, if the draft is ratified, will be placed here by upon completion of the vote. 



FINAL DRAFT VERSION TO BE VOTED UPON BY THE ALAC

The final draft version to be voted upon by the ALAC will be placed here before the vote is to begin.

 


FIRST DRAFT SUBMITTED

Version 2 - 29 Sep 2015

Consensus within the At-Large community was that all 3-character TLDs should not be reserved solely for ccTLDs but the community was split as to whether there was any merit in reserving 3-letter codes for use by ccTLDs at all.

If 3 letter codes were to be used for country codes, the same standard that was applied to the 2-letter codes should also be applied to 3-letter codes as in the ISO 3166-1 list. ISO alpha-3 codes could be reserved as an alternative standard for country and territory codes in the same way that other standards have been reserved - ISO 4217 (for currencies) and ISO 639 (for languages). This would open up the rest of the 3-letter options as gTLDs. 

As ICANN has decided that IDN ccTLDs will be delegated to the same registries as hold their existing ccTLDs, it has been recommended that this precedent should be referred to when the delegation of alpha-3 codes arises.

There was a view that there is no merit in reserving 3-letter codes, firstly because current 3-letter country codes are not widely used and often as not countries use codes other than the ISO ones, e.g ANG for Angola. Secondly, as every geographical area has a 2-letter country code and there are plenty of 2-letter codes remaining, countries may not use their assigned 3-letter code as well.  The call by this group was to open the 3-letter codes to all, and maintain the 2-letter codes for ccTLDs.  

While some 3-letter country codes are easily identifiable as referring to specific countries /territories and others less so, there are still others that would be very desirable as 3-letter gTLDs.  A reserved list would restrict access to good codes for gTLDs even if they were unlikely ever to be used as ccTLDs.

As an alternative, 3-letter codes listed as ccTLDs in ISO 3166-1 could be made available as gTLDs as long as they were not marketed or used as pseudo-ccs,  although it was recognised that policing or enforcing this could be problematic. To reserve some 3-letter codes and not others could create consumer confusion and cause issues to be raised later on. 

There are already examples where 3-letter country codes are currently being used as gTLDs by other organisations (eg .com). Current exceptions to the reservation standard did not invalidate the standard moving forward but creating exceptions could diminish trust in ICANN and subsequently trust in the stability of the DNS. 

There were opposing views as to the appropriateness of either the GNSO or the ccNSO as manager of the 3-letter country/territory codes, but some resistance was expressed with regards to the GNSO taking charge of Alpha-3 codes in competition with Alpha-2 codes run by the ccNSO. 

There was very strong agreement among the community that there is a need for a moratorium where a full evaluation should be made of the potential impacts of the current expansion of the existing new gTLD programme. It has also been recommended to increase user confidence in navigating the enlarged domain space that along with a time-framed moratorium, promotional and educational resources and activities related to the introduction of the new gTLDS be developed in areas (geographical, political, social, economic, etc) that were not served well in the first run.

Version 1 - 28 Sep 2015 

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