ccTLD - what would happen if the country no longer existed?

[draggar]

Here's a plausible scenario:

We have the two Koreas: .kp for North Korea, .kn for South Korea.

The two nations both back out of the cease fire and war breaks out. China and Russia sit this one out and Japan helps out the South, both backed by the US and NATO.

NK loses and SK "annexes" the North to make a, once again, "unified' Korean peninsula.

So the question is - what would happen to the .kp ccTLD? I'm sure SK would have the say in it since they would not control the registry for .kp

Have we seen this before? .cccp? Yugoslavia? East / West Germany?

 

[blacknight]

It's a lot harder to remove a tld from the root than it is to add one from what I've seen
ICANN tried to remove the former Soviet Union ccTLD, but it's still there, as there are still quite a few people using it ...

 

[jmcc]

Well Yugoslavia's ccTLD (.yu) is being phased out in favour of other local ccTLDs. The .su ccTLD (old Soviet Union/CCCP's ccTLD) is supposed to be in the process of being phased out but it has around 80K registrations still. The East German ccTLD was not allocated. Some of the stuff is on this Wikipedia page (though currently Wikipedia is having a bit of a dispute with the domain name industry over the term 'domainer'):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CcTLD

Regards...jmcc

 

[Gerry]

Have we seen this before? .cccp? Yugoslavia? East / West Germany?

We have seen this recently with Russia (Soviet Union).

I forget all the particulars, but after the break up of the former Soviet Union, ICANN had passed a resolution to suspend a particular ccTLD .su to be phased out. But many diehard Russians refuse to let it slip into obscurity. From what I understand, the matter is being reviewed and perhaps under new ownership and management.

 

[katherine]

In the case of .kp the extension is virtually unused so no big deal here.

 

[Gerry]

Reserved/unassigned: .um .bl .eh .mf
Allocated/unused: .bv .gb .pm .sj .so .yt
Phaseout: .tp .yu
Deleted/retired: .bu .cs .dd .zr