[CPWG] [GTLD-WG] [registration-issues-wg] URGENT - WT5 proposal for 3-letter country codes

[Roberto Gaetano]

Justine,
I have already expressed my opinion, so no need to repeat it, but I would like to point out one little known fact. See below.

On 15.08.2018, at 04:16, Justine Chew <justine.chew at gmail.com<mailto:justine.chew at gmail.com>> wrote:

...
In any case, I take the view that by virtue of ICANN being represented on
the ISO 3166-1 Maintenance Agency, there should be at the very least, some
moral obligation by ICANN to recognise and treat (in the first instance)
all such 3-letter strings which exactly match the ISO 3166-1 3-letter codes
as a representation of the corresponding assigned country.


The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), my employer for 13 years, is also a permanent member of ISO-3166-MA - God only knows why.
You would think that the IAEA would have some “moral obligation” to at least use the standard that they participate in maintaining. Wrong.
Shortly after joining the IAEA I was reading a document and pointed out that the authors had a code wrong, because they referred to Austria as “AU” while the correct code was “AT”, “AU” being Australia. I also made a joke that I thought was funny quoting a popular saying in Austria that goes: “No kangaroos in Austria". My Director called me and told me to learn the codes in use at the IAEA before speaking and making silly jokes about things I do not know. He was not even aware that ISO-3166 codes existed. As responsible for software development I suggested then to have at least a conversion table between ISO and IAEA codes, but his reply was, verbatim: “Who cares about ISO codes? And who uses them anyway?”. For those who do not know, the IAEA is a specialised UN Agency and a Director has the position of a career diplomat.
Later on, when the CS re-delegation crisis came along, I discovered that even the IAEA representative on the ISO-3166-MA was not aware that ccTLDs were using that standard, and therefore saw no problem in reassigning the former Czechoslovakia code to Serbia and Montenegro (Srbija i Crna Gora).
Regards,
Roberto

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/cpwg/attachments/20180821/93ebb2d6/attachment.html>