Scotland ccTLD?

[brunner at nic-naa.net (Eric Brunner-Williams)]

On 9/17/14 9:10 AM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "David Conrad" <drc at virtualized.org>
>> Right. Similarly, .SU has been assigned. SU is a bit odd in the sense
>> that it was moved to â??transitionally reservedâ?? when the Soviet Union
>> broke up and a batch of new country codes were created (e.g., RU, UA,
>> etc.) and then, in 2007 (or so) it was moved from â??transitionally
>> reservedâ?? (which the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency says â??stop use ASAPâ??)
>> to â??exceptionally reservedâ??. The .SU ccTLD is also a bit odd in that
>> it is the only code that does not (officially) have a nation-state
>> (and hence a legal framework) behind it. In practice, I believe it
>> falls under the Russian legal framework.
> The European Union (holder of .eu) is not a nation-state either, is it?
>
> Cheers,
> -- jra
iso3166-1 is not restricted to political jurisdictions, e.g., a 
"nation-state". there are about a dozen regional intellectual property 
organizations which have been allocated iso3166-1 code points, along 
with quite a few bits of postage stamp trivia, my favorites being those 
that have no human residents, some have been recently withdrawn.

in the gtld trade, the .eu hack and the .ps hack stand out as creative 
use -- the first used the existence of a reserved alpha2 for a currency, 
the second a statistical abstraction -- to solve two similar problems -- 
the non-availability of namespaces to de facto political jurisdictions. 
the arab league has attempted, without success to date, to replicate the 
.eu hack, and an attempt has been made, also without success, to 
re-purpose rather than retire an iso3166-1 code point, previously 
allocated to the united states and managed until withdrawn, by the 
insular affairs office of the department of the interior, for one or 
more indigenous polities of north america.

this just popped up in my fb feed (yes, i read rue89), apropos of the 
.su sub-thread. in keeping with the 
owen-knows-more-about-everything-than-i-do truism, one is free to ignore 
this and hold fast to owen's latest revealed wisdom:

http://rue89.nouvelobs.com/2014/09/15/lurss-existe-toujours-internet-cest-devenu-zone-254809

-e