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

[Justine Chew]

Dear Roberto,

I've only just seen your email, so my apologies for the late reply.

Yes, I agree with your assessment, I too doubt that many realise that ICANN
is represented on the ISO 3166-1 Maintenance Agency. Having said that, I
don't believe it it is conducive for ICANN/the Community to "perpetuate"
this ignorance (even if others do). IMO this right thing to do is if
(somehow) the ISO 3166-1 standard were to be ignored or disregarded, that
ICANN should get itself off the ISO 3166-1 Maintenance Agency.

But as you well know, as idealists, we have to grapple with many things
that just get lost along the way.

Regards,

Justine
-----


On Tue, 21 Aug 2018 at 16:17, Roberto Gaetano <roberto_gaetano at hotmail.com>
wrote:

> 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> 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
>
>
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