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From DIN website

NIA's Steering Committee was NOT called upon to review, and possibly override, the working committee's technical decision - it does not have the authority to do so. It was, however, involved in a decision as to whether or not the voting procedure at ISO correctly adhered to the formal criteria. Because the Steering Committee's decision did not relate to any technical issues or the content of the standard itself, but dealt solely with the formalities of the JTC 1 "fast track" procedure, i.e. adherence to procedural rules in the standardization process, DIN felt it was necessary to take a position on this matter. This is the reason the DIN staff member participated in the voting procedure and did not abstain, as is the rule in questions of technical content.

On 27 March 2008 the NIA Steering Committee members who were entitled to vote did NOT vote on approval or non-approval of ISO/IEC DIS 29500 as an International Standard, but SOLELY on the regularity of the voting procedure itself. With a majority of 7 to 6, and 7 abstentions, the Steering Committee deemed the procedure as being in conformity with the rules, and thus had no reason to override the working committee's "YES" vote. Had the majority of the Steering Committee been convinced that the procedures for developing and voting on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 were in any way irregular, the German vote would have been changed to "ABSTAIN".

I read this to say, that the technical question "is Germany in favour of this standard?" degenerated to a vote on technicalities of the voting procedure, this gave a "tie" (6-6, 7 abstentions), and then, disregarding the usual protocol, the DIN representative gave themselves a vote and broke the tie in favour of standardizing OOXML on the fast track anyway, whereas the only effect of a no vote would have been, that it would have to be standardized on the normal track.

Would you trust a standard for food safety, if it was decided upon in this way?

In the photo linked, the sign clearly says, "George Orwell". Seems odd since the site owner is a quasi-governmental organization.

In the photo linked, the sign clearly says, "George Orwell". Seems odd since the site owner is a quasi-governmental organization.

DIN, the German Institute for Standardization, is a registered association, founded in 1917. Its head office is in Berlin. Since 1975 it has been recognized by the German government as the national standards body and represents German interests at international and European level.

they standartize everything. i wouldn't be surprised if there would be a DIN Norm for a government linux distro.

"North Korea" rather than "The People's Democratic Republic of Korea", etc.
I would rather believe the ISO-3166 standard over the CIA wrt countries' names.
And if they can't even name the country (or know which emabassies not to bomb) why should you trust them?

IANA has stated a number of times that it is not in the business of deciding what is or is not a country. Instead, they use the ISO 3166 standard to decide when they create new ccTLDs.

Reading the rules for adding a name to the ISO-3166 standard you'll see that the only way that .eu would be created as a ccTLD would be if the UN added the EU to its list of "standard country codes".

Is the UN likely to recognize the EU as a nation any time soon? No. Is there likely to be a .eu ccTLD any time soon? No.

IANA has stated a number of times that it is not in the business of deciding what is or is not a country. Instead, they use the ISO 3166 standard to decide when they create new ccTLDs.

Reading the rules for adding a name to the ISO-3166 standard you'll see that the only way that .eu would be created as a ccTLD would be if the UN added the EU to its list of "standard country codes".

Is the UN likely to recognize the EU as a nation any time soon? No. Is there likely to be a .eu ccTLD any time soon? No.

in fact all 2 letter top level domains belong to countries, as listed in ISO 3166-1

There are a set of what are called "top-level domain names" (TLDs). These are the generic TLDs (EDU, COM, NET, ORG, GOV, MIL, and INT), and the two letter country codes from ISO-3166. ( RFC 1591)

Oh yeah, and before anyone mentions it, the very next line from RFC 1591 is "It is extremely unlikely that any other TLDs will be created.". Just goes to show...

"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"

nic.cx says it's for Christmas Island.

As does the English country names and code elements page on the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency Web site. (The French country names and code elements page says it's "CHRISTMAS, ÎLE".)

nic.cx says it's for Christmas Island.

As does the English country names and code elements page on the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency Web site. (The French country names and code elements page says it's "CHRISTMAS, ÎLE".)

nic.cx says it's for Christmas Island.

As does the English country names and code elements page on the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency Web site. (The French country names and code elements page says it's "CHRISTMAS, ÎLE".)

What the ISO 3166 maintenance agency say about .eu

In short the 2 letter domain has to appear in ISO 3166-1, which is in turn based on the UN Statistical servises lists. eu does not appear as a 'country or teritory' in either.

Have a look at their report on asigning the .pl TLD to Palestine

a quote from the ISO 3166 page:

The name European Union is not officially listed in ISO 3166-1 because the standard contains codes of names of countries and not names of groupings of countries or names of organizations.
However, the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency advises all users of the ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 code to apply the code element EU if they need to represent the name European Union.

ICANN is just a user of ISO 3166 and can decide to use the EU code.

Benno

The EU is not a country. EU is not in ISO 3166. Indeed, EU could never be put in ISO 3166 under the current rules.

If the EU was able to get a country code despite not being a country, it could potentially set a precedent which would allow the creation of a very large number of new TLDs "by the back door".

I have no particular opinion on the proposed new TLDs, .banc seems reasonable, .shop a little more dubious (unless there is a sensible second-level domain system). But I strongly disagree in that it won't do anything beneficial.

1. Sure, banks and FIs have already their names and variations registered, but there are hundreds of TLD times hundreds of variations, not even the biggest of institutions can cover all of these. If .banc can be maintained by a reliable international financial institution with an authorative list of acceptable applicants (and no, NSI is not the first institution that springs to mind), .banc will have higher value than .com which is free-for-all.
2. .com is bloated and oversubscribed, with the consequences of DNS slowdowns and the registration of ever more contrieved names. Usenet was in the exact same situation 20 years ago. They used a radical solution that is hard to repeat today, they changed the existing names, forcing them into subdomains. Any other change won't help in the short term, and as long as multiple registrations and a dread of subdomains is the rule, inefficiency is the inevitable result. Most good short names (known companies, evocative English words) are already gone, and your option is either a-very-long-n-contrieved-name.com or shortname.lingerie.shop. You would register both, but most likely you'd use the second in your ads.

Generally, it is useful to separate between TLTLDs and TLTLDs (two letter top level domains and three letter top level domains). The two letter domains (country codes) generally do well, even if some of them are underused (.us) and other overused for other purposes (.tm, .tv, .md), and others may be so in the far-out future (.ai and .et; .sf is vacant as Finland use .fi). There are a couple hundred of these, but there is an established standard maintaining them.

The three (and soon four+) letter domains are more ad hoc. Some of these (.gov and also .edu) are US only, others (.com, .net, .org) are used internationally, one (.int) is only used by international organisations. TLDs with clear rules for which entities belong and which don't belong in that domain, and preferably with a predictable subdomain-structure and naming conventions should have an advantage.

There is a .ms top level domain, it it the country code for Montserrat.

Where the hell is .cx?

Most (if not all) two-letter domains are ISO 3166 country codes, and "CX" is the code for Christmas Island, which is "an Australian Territory" near Java (the Indonesian island, not The Programming Language Formerly Known As Oak :-)).

However, this does not necessarily mean that the Anonymous Coed in question is necessarily on Christmas Island; it is, I suspect, possible to buy Christmas Island domains if you're a non-resident (various other countries, such as Tonga (".to"), do the same).

Don't be stupid. He obviously meant migrate to a system using ISO 2 letter country codes as the TLD.

A recent version of these can be found here.

(just improving the previous AC)