[Chapter-delegates] Invitation: ISOC at ICANN78 reception (really Taiwan)

[Andrew Sullivan]

Hi there,

On Mon, Oct 16, 2023 at 04:34:03PM +0200, Johan Helsingius via Chapter-delegates wrote:
>Thank you for the invitation, but on the registration form I happened
>to notice that Taiwan is listed as "Province of China" in the list
>of participant countries. While I can understand that that is based
>on ISO3166 and thus UN politics

Yes.  RFC 1591 said this:

       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.

We think the general principle for naming countries should probably follow the same guidance, so we use the same principles.  In general we prefer to stick to the 2-character country codes, but sometimes that is too hard for humans to use and we need to spell things out.  That's what happened in this case.

> , I then checked with a colleague
>from Taiwan, and was told that they were also not allowed to
>have an "ISOC Taiwan Chapter", but only a Taipei Chapter.

That isn't the way I heard it (with the understanding that I wasn't employed here when the compromise was reached -- the chapter was chartered in 1996).  As I understand things, the problem was that if the chapter wanted to be called the Taiwan Chapter, then its formal name would need to be the Internet Society Taiwan (Province of China) Chapter, and that was not acceptable to some people.  The solution that people apparently hit on was to establish a Taipei Chapter instead.

Note that the entire chapters community has a say over who else becomes a chapter, which makes place names and so forth somewhat more complicated than it might otherwise be.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan, President & CEO, Internet Society
e:sullivan at isoc.org m:+1 416 731 1261
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