[ih] .UK vs .GB

[Nigel Roberts]

Far be it from me to be seen to clarify John's first hand knowledge of 
RFC 1591, but it's worth pointing out that the decision to use 
ISO-3166-1 was not first documented in RFC 1591, but already in RFC 920 
(October 1984) as follows

> Countries
> 
> The English two letter code (alpha-2) identifying a country according the the ISO Standard for "Codes for the Representation of Names of Countries" [5].
> 
> As yet no country domains have been established.  As they are established information about the administrators and agents will be made public, and will be listed in subsequent editions of this memo."
> 

Stephen Deerhake and I put together an (as yet unfinished) hyperlinked 
timeline of the DNS quite recently. Even though there are some places 
where the editing is still a little rough, I think there is some useful 
stuff which is not easily accessible otherwise.

You can find it at http://timeline.as

It does need a little work, and we need to move it from using TikiWiki 
(which seemed like a good idea at the time) to something faster, but 
there are some interesting things there...




On 04/15/2018 02:13 PM, John Klensin wrote:
>> The only explanation I got orally was that "GB stands for Great Britain, while UK stands for United Kingdom of Great Britain and the Northern Ireland".
>>
>> That was enough for me. Don't even remember who explained it, but it was around the famous entry of .CS into the root zone that created the "interesting" situation with CS.BERKELEY.EDU (and others) and massive weird extra hacking in sendmail.cf due to the Janet "reverse" order of labels in a domain name.
> 
> Let me try an even less complicated one, based on what I was told when
> we were evaluating what became the decision to use ISO 3166 alpha-2
> codes:   The country code system started because of a request from the
> UK to be able to manage their own DNS hierarchy rather than depending
> on a US-based organization to manage the TLD.  The ccTLDs are US and
> UK were decided upon (and possibly delegated) before other
> administrative decisions about ccTLDs were made and "UK" was what they
> asked for.
> 
> FWIW: (1) While RFC 1591 was not published until 1994, it, for the
> most part, described thinking and procedures that had had been in
> place for years rather than anything of significant that was novel.
> (2) YJ Park, whom some of you may know, tried to sort though all of
> these issues and history while working on her dissertation.  The
> search for answers to questions of this type might reasonably start
> with her and that dissertation.  That should lead to some context and
> references even where she does not have exact answers.
> 
>      john
> 
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>