Re: Thank you
"Having a country domain like .de under a country domain .tl seems ripe for confusion"
In Canada, the ".ca" domain used to be split up by province, with each province regulating it separately under their own sub-domains. Thus you would have "doman.on.ca" for Ontario, etc. After a while they scrapped that idea and just had everyone except for the provincial governments themselves register directly under ".ca" (e.g. "domian.ca").
There are a few collisions between the "provincial" and foreign codes such as:
".nf" - For both Newfoundland and Norfolk Island.
".nl" - For both Newfoundland and Labrador and Netherlands.
".nu" - For both Nunavut and Niue.
".pe" - For both Prince Edward Island and Peru.
".sk" - For both Saskatchewan and Slovakia.
The province of "Newfoundland" changed its name to "Newfoundland and Labrador". Labrador was always part of the colony and later province, but was only recently recognized in the official name (everyone still just calls it Newfoundland anyway). As you can see, they still managed to collide the name, and the second time it was with an even bigger country. I've no idea how they handled the change-over in domains in that case. Of course they didn't need to involve ICANN, so it's possible that they simply kept both.
I've never heard of any confusion with country codes arising from this. The ".ca" tells you it's Canada. The only "problems" I've heard of are with spammers and scammers who don't know the history of domain names in Canada and think the two letter province sub-domain is the name of a company or ISP and represent themselves as being the tech support for that organization. The result of that is they are shown to be even more obviously fake than usual.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
