[Techtalk] Criteria for TLDs

[Magni Onsoien]

On 2009-05-11 06:39:20 -0700, Kelly Jones said:
> Actually, Greenland wasn't a country when the TLD was assigned, though
> it will become one next month (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland).
> 
> I probably chose a bad example. Here are some better ones:
> 
> US Virgin Islands (.vi), a US territory
> Heard Island and McDonald Islands (.hm), uninhabited Australian territory
> Reunion Island (.re), part of France
> British Indian Ocean Territory (.io), uninhabited UK territory
> 
> My point: many non-independent islands smaller and less important than
> Hawaii have TLDs.

ccTLDs are based on the 3 letter abbreviations in ISO 3166-1. If you
read the wikipedia articles on ISO 3166-1 and ccTLDs (see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain ) you will
find pointers to the different reasoning for adding countries,
territories and other areas to the list, which again is used as a basis
for letting a registry run a ccTLD registryi (decided by IANA through
ICANN). The paragraph "Criteria for inclusion" in the ISO 3166-1 article
is probably the best direct source.

Obviously you should not trust the information in wikipedia directly,
but check the references and the web pages of e.g. IANA and
International Organization for Standardization themselves.



Magni :-)
-- 
sash is very good for you.