wait... Did UN have rules over ccTLD? I thought ICANN is not under UN.

If I'm not mistaken, ICANN uses the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes as country TLD's, so in a sense the UN indirectly specifies the rules for ICANN. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

The UN publishes a list of recognised member states. ISO maintains a list of codes. IANA uses that list to determine whether a country code TLD is valid. But that's the extent of the UN's involvement in the governance of the root zone.

There are plenty of TLDs for areas which aren’t countries, whcih don’t claim to be counties, which nobody recognises as countries. .gg and .gu for example.

Those are not ccTLDs though.

Yes, they are.

https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/gg.html

Oh, I was wrong. My bad.

are you sure? Wikipedia describes both as being country code tlds, and both have an official ISO 3166-1 code that matches their domain.

> The IANA is not in the business of deciding what is and what is not a country. The selection of the ISO 3166 list as a basis for country code top-level domain names was made with the knowledge that ISO has a procedure for determining which entities should be and should not be on that list.

Jon Postel, RFC 1591 (Domain Name System Structure and Delegation)

There won't be any Kosovo country code because Kosovo is Serbia.

A few companies in Kosovo whose links and domains I maintain went for example-ks.com.

Taiwan is less recognised by the outside world than Kosovo is, and it has its own country code. Same with Palestine. Having a country code is only weakly related to being a country.

Ahem, the Republic of China is their preferred name.

No, it’s the official name. Do you also correct people who say “France” or “Germany” to say “Republic of France” and “Federal Republic of Germany”?

Like, what’s even your point?

The point is that Taiwan claims to be the legitimate government of the whole of China (being the island where the former government fled to when the Communists took over the rest of the country - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War), and they express that by using "Republic of China" (as opposed to "People's Republic of China"). Similar to how there used to be a "Federal Republic of Germany" and a "German Democratic Republic". You could call both "Germany", but that would be confusing...

That's mostly a symbolic legal fiction. And I'm guessing here but at least the half of the country who wants to be independent might prefer to be called Taiwan rather than RoC in casual conversation.

It is not confusing at all. Taiwan is a commonly used name for the ROC, and (mainland) China is generally understood as a reference to the PRC.

Since the de facto territories of the two states are common knowledge, you can unambiguously refer to them just by mentioning their rough position on the map. Similarly, East/West Germany were not officially called East/West Germany, and it was not the official name of either country, but people still understood what the words meant.

> The point is that Taiwan claims to be the legitimate government of the whole of China

Not since the early 90s.

Well actually it's a bit more complex since there are multiple parties and they disagree, and there's some nuance (e.g. "one China" but without actually defining what that means, exactly). But "Taiwan claims to be the legitimate government of the whole of China" is woefully outdated and incorrect.

.aq, .ad, .eh, .eu, .io, .krd, .mo, .su come to mind.

As does rfc1591

“The IANA is not in the business of deciding what is and what is not a country.”

Well the people of Kosovo don’t think that way.

Serbian detected. Kosovo is a country.

> Kosovo is a country.

Not according to the international community and international law.

The majority of the UN recognised countries, 106 do not recognise it. Whilst only 94 do.

The same way that Afghan democratic government melted away, when the US troops withdrew, so will "Kosovo" go.

> The majority of the UN recognised countries, 106 do not recognize it.

A majority -- 102 of 193 -- UN members do recognize it. You may be counting some (though with your number, I think not all) of the false claims of withdrawal of recognition by other states which have been issued by the governments or state-affiliated media of Serbia and/or Russia, but later refuted by the governments in question, as being true.

Please remove your nationalistic genocidal support from this site for tech talk.

Kosovo will not "go" away just because you like Milosevic decide to murder more Albanians - This is completely disregarding the fact that Serbia is an island of nationalism and revisionism clinging to the past, surrounded by democracies living in the present day.

Serbia will never again have the capacity to execute on these misguided beliefs.

.xk does not exist. https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db

As the parent comment said, it's a temporary TLD, so by design it does not appear in the root listing. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.xk

It has never been present in the DNS root zone. A TLD that doesn't exist in the DNS is not really a TLD, is it?