[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[Nigel Roberts]

ISO is part of the UN, isn't it?

One of the ways on to the ISO-3166-1 is via the UN Statistics Bureau.


Nigel


On 02/18/2011 12:39 PM, John Day wrote:
> Just out of curiosity could some explain how the UN got involved with
> ISO 3316?
>
> The connection is not obvious to me.
>
> Thanks.
>
>
> At 12:07 +0100 2011/02/18, Jaap Akkerhuis wrote:
>> (Eric? wrote)
>>
>> No one from this list nor anyone else I tried to contact could give me a
>> definitive answer on when this decision was made. I had to try and
>> figure it
>> out myself. It appears that something changed between May and July of
>> 1984.
>> In July, a draft RFC was posted that included the ISO-3166 list for the
>> first time. Four months beforehand, Postel first announced to
>> Namedroppers
>> that he felt there should be countries represented somewhere in the
>> hierarchy. This came after a fairly significant amount of lobbying by all
>> kinds of people, but many of them had OSI sympathies.
>>
>> My collegue Piet Beertema was involved in the discussions about
>> which list to use. I remember that among other possible lists where
>> the UPU list and the list of Road Vehicle signs (or something like
>> that). The last one has variable length codes which didn't make it
>> attractive. The ISO list was indeed interesting because the UN is
>> involved. And the 2-char instead of the 3-char codes where attractive
>> because there would be no clashes with existing domains (com, edu,
>> net).
>>
>> I alsways think that the whole DNS became popular independent of
>> the transport protocol due to the uumapping project and similar
>> stuff (the JANET gateway etc).
>>
>> jaap
>
>