(What If?) ccTLD Delegation Question

Mon Oct 3 21:52:26 UTC 2005

On 3-Oct-2005, at 17:28, Joe Johnson wrote:

> Call it Monday Boredom, if you will, but a funny DNS question just  
> popped into my head: if I were to, say, win the lotto and buy my  
> own Island (which, of course, would technically be its own  
> country), would I be able to receive a ccTLD for said island  
> nation?  Kind of like .joejohnsonisland  or .jji?

If your island had a two-letter code assigned to it in ISO-3166, then  
you could petition ICANN to become the ccTLD manager, and have the  
corresponding ccTLD delegated to your nameservers. I believe all  
previous redelegations are documented on www.icann.org, so there's  
plenty of prior art to review there before wielding your hyper- 
platinum amex card.

If the nameservers were already present within the borders of the  
island, and your acquisition had caused you coincidentally to also  
become Supreme Leader and Ultimate Dictator, presumably you could  
just dispatch some armed goons to secure the ccTLD infrastructure and  
avoid the ICANN-wrangling part.

If your island had no ISO-3166 code assigned, then you would first  
need to talk to the maintainers of ISO-3166 to get it added to the  
list. If your island was not a widely-recognised territory or  
country, this might involve petitions to the UN.

> If so, would the DNS have to be actually contained inside of said  
> island?  I think not, as it was mentioned earlier that .iq was run  
> from Texas, but it's always good to ask.

There are lots of entries in ISO-3166 where the country/region/island/ 
economy and its master server are not colocated, geographically.  
Sometimes this is a practical consideration (e.g. AQ is not hosted in  
Antarctica, since that'd be an expensive and inconvenient place for  
it to live) and sometimes it's a historical artefact (e.g. a pre- 
ICANN delegation, or a benevolent stop-gap until a delegation could  
be moved in-country).

Many developing countries do not have their ccTLD infrastructure  
deployed within their borders, for want of local skills,  
infrastructure or (often) confidence in running such services  
themselves. The Internet Society and the Network Startup Resource  
Centre (amongst others) expend a lot of effort trying to remedy these  
issues -- a local registry for local services can often be a useful  
catalyst for Internet deployment.

Joe