[Ctn-crosscom] ISO 3-letter country codes

[Timo Võhmar]

Hello everybody,

I am Timo from Estonian Internet Foundation the ccTLD of Estonia (.ee),
fresh observer in this WG. We have had some thoughts on the 3-letter ISO
country codes for some time already playing with an idea how to use it. The
CENTR survey some time ago on the topic of releasing the 3-letter codes as
gTLDs made us move a bit quicker and form our ideas to a vision.

It was a suprise when we found out that 3-letter codes are not reserved
currently for countries but for future use. When we replied to the CENTR
survey we had an impression that countries just do not see the value in
3-letter codes for them selves - to avoid confusion for registrants and
unnecessary competition on ccTLD level. So we were quite positive in our
answers toward releasing the codes as unused resource. But everything
changed for us when we found out that even countries cannot have these
under any condition. I know we were not the only ones under this false
presumption as this topic has not been much discussed before and I would
like to give my contribution to this debate.

For starters we think that current status quo of just holding back the
3-letter codes like any other such reserved lists (AGB etc) is not ideal.
It is unused resource that is of value and after making the new gTLD
revolution it seems logical to put these in use as well. But we do not
support releasing the country codes as gTLDs as the first step.

We support doing this in two steps - making the 3-letter codes available to
countries and after everyone that has an idea or sees an importance in
securing the domain for that particular country the rest of the codes
should be made available to everyone in some future gTLD round.

The reasoning for this is simple - generally 3-letter codes are more
closely related to the country name than 2-letter codes. And this is a big
risk for these ccTLDs for obvious reasons like false association. We do not
see the .com example as a precedent for releasing all others as well - this
is traditional gTLD, has well known meaning and should be considered as
exception in this case.

After the release of IDN country code TLDs there are now three letter
ccTLDs out there as well so there is no clear differentiation between
ccTLDs and gTLDs by looking at the number of letters in TLD. Furthermore
some ccTLDs are operated as gTLDs (.me, .tv, .io etc). So this argument is
no good as well.

In short we see the two step release of 3-letter ISO country codes as an
alternative to the current status quo, a compromise to break the stalemate
and move things forward.

All questions and comments are very welcome.

Best Regards,

Timo Võhmar
Arendusjuht / Head of development

Eesti Interneti SA  / Estonian Internet Foundation
www.internet.ee
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