If nobody is ask today why the .FR is the ccTLD using in France, things aren’t always so evident. We know a little about these two letter codes that really come from an international standard named ISO 3166 which variation was already used, the big time of Pony Express! When, in the middle of the 80’s, countries wanted to connect to Internet, the American Jonathan Postel- the IANA maker, the ancestor of ICANN- used this respectable list when he wanted to determine codes have been used by them. For this, the .CS would have to use by Czechoslovakia but this country has disappeared and given place to Czech Republic, then the active code today is .CZ. The .CS was “available” then and it was given to “Serbia-Montenegro” by ISO organism in July 23rd and it replaces Yugoslavia (which code .YU is still active). To assign a new code according to the geographic name of the country is laudable but it isn’t without consequences: existent domain names into .YU must be kept of course and they don’t have to be simply substituted by .CS on pain of putting on danger the Net stability. But, over all, the ISO qualification search goes further than ccTLDs! The British Library underlines, for example, it is used for classified works by country. Will you see into the same shelves Czech works before 1990 with Serbian books from 2003? The debate isn’t finished yet today. We can be sorry for the neutrality indicated by ICANN who “doesn’t want to define what a country is or isn’t”, according with the President and General Director “PDG” words, it let plan a doubt that doesn’t do a favor to the Internet community.

See http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/index.html

JCV & SB