Wales calls on ICANN to unleash .cymru Welsh deputy first minister Ieuan Wyn Jones has complained about delays to ICANN's new generic top-level domains programme, which are holding up a plan to offer citizens ".cymru" domain names. dotCYM, which is proposing the domain, had originally planned to apply for ".cym", but was forced into a rethink after ICANN changed …
The ITU is probably the only world organisation which should have legitimate authority over which TLD names should be allocated to which nations. I can see justification for some international recognised organisations e.g. .olympics or .fifa for sporting organisations to have TLDs, again such decisions should come under the auspices of an organisation with a UN mandate and not that of a private company. I Don't think such global naming rights should extend to private corporations.
That doesn't make the ITU competent to handle DNSSEC root zone signing or similar technical issues, so a treaty giving the ITU authority over the namespace allocations should require delegation of technical implementation responsibility of these naming decisions to a competent technical company or collection of such to enforce fair competition.
Proper countries get a two-letter TLD already. It's their ISO3166 country code. This code is issued by ISO, not the ITU. Why do they need another TLD? IDN variants of the country name don't count because they're essentially aliases for the two-letter country code.
And if you think ITU's not competent to handle technical matters, who is going to pay for the coordination and upkeep of the root zone? That's currently done by IANA, which is part of ICANN.
Incidentally, the US government has just started a comment period on the role of IANA. Here's the URL http://www.ntia.doc.gov/frnotices/2011/fr_ianafunctionsnoi_02252011.pdf
Oh and if you don't like how ICANN plans to create lots of TLDs, there are plenty of open forums where you can make those concerns known. Or go to an ICANN meeting and scream at the board. It's all open and public. The meetings are even free. ICANN run lengthy consultations on almost everything. All you need to take part is understand English and have a working email address.
ITU has no equivalent. Only ITU members are allowed to discuss and vote on the things they decide. All of that takes place behind closed doors. Checkout El reg's articles on last years ITU Plenipotentiary meeting that Kieren Mccarthy wrote.
"Proper countries get a two-letter TLD already. It's their ISO3166 country code. "
ISO may have done a fair job allocating these 2 letter codes. But they don't represent any _legitimacy_ as far as global naming is concerned, when countries which don't have their own standards defining organisations and which are consequently not members of ISO object to who gets which letters. As to what is and what is not a "proper country" just read the discussion below concerning conflicting views as to the status of Wales to see what chance there is of that being resolved through consensus organised through a forum rigged up by a private company.
So when it comes to non country domains and ICANN being in a position to authorise itself to flog off the best names to the highest bidders, I'd rather have a process with some claim to legitimacy, even if this does mean it has to go through the ITU, (potentially reformed as part of the treaty agreement which grants it this authority). The ITU has exercised this responsibilitiy reasonably well when it comes to the very similar exercise of allocating international dialling prexes to phone numbers.
The alternative to some kind of legitimacy is fragmentation where I operate my root zone to suit my preferences and you operate yours to suit yours, there are many competing root zones all different, and most of the world gets to use the Microsoft or Google versions or the one provided by whichever ISP configures their recursive DNS resolver and the agendas that go with any one of these. I'm sure flogging off unused TLD names within these private directories would be very profitable. As another commenter has pointed out, excluding large areas of the namespace does have certain security benefits ... at the expense of false positives.
Lets face it the root zone file is small enough that anyone competent in DNS content server administration is capable of evaluating most of it and replicating the bits they want in half a day or so. But I think standardisation of this is better for the end users than fragmentation of it where names can change based upon the profit and whim of a private corporation and are not constant between multiple versions of it.
FFS! ISO is the internationally recognised authority for country codes. Any country is free to set up their own alternative to that but it will have no legitimacy beyond that country's borders.
ITU is also no fucking use for Wales or .cymru. At least not until Wales becomes a sovereign state and a member of the UN. At which point it will get ISO country codes automatically. Wales isn't even eligible to join the ITU until it becomes a member of the UN.
Anyways ITU is every bit as much a rich mens club as ISO, only with more change-resistant powerful vested interests to protect. For example incumbent telcos. Or banana republics who rely on international telephone call settlements to keep their country afloat.
Wales is not and never has been a country.
If you think otherwise you should state when it became a country.
The ebst you could say is that, prior to the Norman, wales was not part of the UK, because it did not exist. Like the rest of Britain, it was ruled by local chieftains, north, south, east, west etc much like England was.
From the late 13th C'. wales was, as now, run from England, first by the 'Kings' then of course by parliament.
So, wales is not a country and never has been.
A Cymro writes :
Technically speaking, you are indeed correct - and by the same logic, *England* is not a country - it is all constitutionally one country (under the Statute of Rhuddlan), whose name is "England & Wales". (This has never been changed, which is why 'devolution' gave the Scottish parliament far more powers - because Scotland *is* a country in its own right.) It would be more correct to refer to them both as 'nations'.
I'll only mention in passing the argument that as a bloke from Anglesey whupped the ass of the English king at Bosworth Field and took the crown, it's really us that govern you (well we would do if the crown hadn't passed to some Scots and then some Germans)
Mine's the one with the "Close-Harmony-Singing Terrorist's Handbook" in the pocket...
Wales was certainly a single kingdom at one point (under Gruffydd ap Llywelyn).
Wales is one of the "constituent countries" of the United Kingdom.
The word "nation" comes from the Latin from birth, and has nothing to do with kings or governments, which is why some groups (eastern European Roma and Native American/First Nation tribes) have their own nationality.
So Wales has been a kingdom, it is recognised as a country, and it's a nation if the people born there associate with each other in some way.
So I have to say I disagree with you.
I thought this had gone away. There was always the question about who should own one of these gTLDs. There were funny arguments when US cities who were talking about it were told that they were second to the name "Boston" or "Bristol" for example.
I really can't see the point of more TLDs. If you are commercial, live under .COM If you are an organisation (like FIFA), live under .ORG If you are country specific, live under that country.
... is that anybody can put stuff there.
36 seconds in and our fast speaking American friend has made his first mistake.
He says with his "four co-equal sovereign nations....." Co-equal ? Just like 'very unique' I suppose.
And he has clearly not heard of the "west Lothian question......".
So there you have it : wales is not a country!
... is that he can post anything here.
Definitions of "country" abound, but one of them is a land ruled by a single king. Another that it is recognised as a single territory by foreign countries. By both those definitions, Wales was a country when the Normans (or did you mean Romans) invaded England.
... is that he can post anything here.
Yep, fair enough.
I did actually mean Normans, not Romans.
By some definitions, England is the oldest country, unified around 900ish under King Athelstan. Some say France [under the Franks] is older.
From 900 to about 1220ish there were various skirmishes with unification and separatism or "chieftanism" around England. Wales was not "unified until around 1220 is when "England took it all...." ; they may have left Anglesey.
However, between 1220ish and the Act of Union in 1707 wales was a dominion of England. It is pretty simple history.
All of this is complicated by the fact that in wales welsh is promoted, but then again, there is Cornish, Yorkshire has it's own dialect... as do a number of parts of the UK.
But nobody, ever, would suggest Yorkshire was a country, despite it's contribution to the monarchy and history [War of the Roses and all that], which means that........
.........wales is not a country.
Erm, he mentions the West Lothian question at about 0:54 - "... no matter that all three have there own devolved parliaments, and are allowed to vote on English laws, despite the reverse not being true"
So you're basing your entire rejection on your dislike of the word coequal. If you had the Collins dictionary to hand you'd know this is a perfectly good word, meaning "Equal with one another, as in rank or size."
So ner!
There's a reason the dot-notation exists, and that's to help categorise addresses. I, for example, would be against a .london TLD. *Which* London? Yes, most people in the English-speaking world would immediately think of the ENglish capital, but that just makes my point... it should be (at best ) .london.uk (possibly even .london.en.uk) and thus (for example) .gov.uk (or is it .go.uk over there?) would be the UK Government's domain while .gov.london.uk would be the London CIty Council.
And what about .paris? Are we referring to the French capital, the Hilton-family laughing-stock, or even any of the multitudes of "paris" towns scattered around the Globe (there is at least one in Australia and several in the USA).
Proliferation of TLD should help *create* sense, not remove it. By all means, create a .movie or a .book TLD and put websites promoting (or discussing) movies and books under them. But let's face it - wales is (last I checked) part of the UK and the UK has its TLD. So it wales' websites should be under the .cymru.uk domain, until such a time as they secede.
YMMV, of course.
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