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

[Andrew Sullivan]

This message replies to two messages at once.

On Mon, Oct 16, 2023 at 03:57:57PM -0700, Charles Mok (gmail) wrote:

>If we have to follow some "standard", I still find that ISO 3166 is
>probably the only one that calls the place "Taiwan, Province of China",

Great.  Do you have a different standard that you can point me to?

>Please understand that issues like these are very sensitive and do mean a
>lot to a lot of people, and any organization must take great care in
>deciding what to do or call names.

Yes, of course.  I'm aware that this is an emotional issue.  We have in fact taken great care.  We have an absolute, unbending policy of sticking to ISO 3166 because it is the only standard we know of in this space.  I think it is plain from the number of electrons already used in this thread that such a policy is not a cavalier or accidental one.  I appreciate that people are unhappy with some of the ISO decisions (I have my own complaints, indeed), and I can only advocate that people engage with their political processes in their respective countries to get the ISO standard updated to something better.

On Mon, Oct 16, 2023 at 04:08:37PM -0700, Charles Mok (gmail) wrote:
>FWIW, I just did a search on OFAC website and found that OFAC itself
>commonly refer to Taiwan as, well, Taiwan.

The thing is, OFAC is an agency of the US Government.  The US Government has policies -- like every other nation state in the world does -- about what other countries exist, what they are called, who the government is, and all the rest of that.

The Internet Society, as I rather hope we all know, is _not_ a government.  So, are you proposing that we should adopt the policies of United States about who is or isn't a country?  Are you proposing that we should adopt other policies of the USG?  Perhaps the one where a previous POTUS said that direct interconnection with China from US networks was not allowed?

We strive, very hard, to be neutral about topics that don't have to do with the Internet.  We therefore rely on other standards bodies for things where we do not have the expertise to make a determination.  That gives us the authority to say, for instance, that the US was wrong to try to prevent direct interconnection with networks in the People's Republic of China, because we are sticking to the topic where we really do know what we are talking about.

If you have some other globally-recognized standard for country names that we have overlooked, I would very much like to hear about it.  I'm not completely out of touch: I understand perfectly well that these are political matters that matter a great deal to a great number of people.  But we are just not competent to decide the correct name and spelling of every country in the world, and so we need a standard.  Find me a better one (but an actual standard, please), and I'll be all ears.

>or even Republic of China. So I submit that in order to satisfy OFAC
>requirements, it is sufficient and even better to simply use a term that
>they use.

We have a database that allows people to interact with us under various circumstances, and that includes country data stored as 3166 country codes.  We _used_ to never use the long names even in registration forms, precisely because of this and other similar issues.  But that is user-hostile, because it means that humans have to know the two-letter code for countries.  So, we do the translation on the fly in the form, and the way we have to do that translation is from the 3166 two-letter code to the expansion.  What you are proposing, instead, is that we take 3166 and change it according to some local optima we might have.  One obvious problem with that is that we are then definitely not using the standard, and we have absolutely no justification why to pick one or another option in a controversial case.  Such cases are rare, but I think this thread demonstrates pretty clearly why the Internet Society doesn't want to be in the middle of that kind of decision-making when we are simply not authorities of any kind on what a country is or what any given country ought to be called.  We have neither the money nor the remit to do the necessary research to demonstrate that our choice is a correct or valid one; we would inevitably disappoint or anger someone; and in the end, we would be distracting ourselves from the important work of trying to ensure the Internet is for everyone.

Best regards,

A


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