As noted in our APTLD72 Communique and Statement dated 18 September 2017, we expressed our awareness of continuing efforts to register designated countries and territories as gTLDs. As noted in the Communique from APTLD72, the APTLD expressly stated its support for the continuation of the status-quo regarding country and territory designators as top-level domains, i.e.:
all 2-letter ASCII codes, whether or not in the ISO 3166 alpha-2 list, are reserved for ccTLDs,
all 3-letter ASCII codes in the ISO 3166 alpha-3 list are reserved and cannot be applied for, and
any string in the Reserved Country and Territory Names lists referred to in the ICANN document https://www.icann.org/resources/country-territory-names/#reserved would not be delegated as a gTLD.
LK Domain Registry re-affirms this position taken at APTLD72.
The LK Domain Registry categorically rejects this proposal for the following reasons:
As noted in the APTLD72 Communique, all 2-letter ASCII codes, whether or not in the ISO 3166 alpha-2 list, have historically been reserved for ccTLDs.
As the widely circulated “White Paper on the GNSO proposal regarding two-character top-level domains” argues, it is entirely possible that the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency may, at some point in the future, begin to assign 2-character alpha-numeric strings as Country and Territory code points.
Depending upon the type face employed, introduction of 2-character strings containing a digit may well cause visual confusion for the internet-user, thus leading to security issues within the DNS.
In addition, we would like to stress that creating 2-letter ASCII TLDs (regardless of inclusion of numeric characters or not) would crack a solidly established notion among Internet users that “all ASCII ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all two-letter top-level domains are ccTLDs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain ).
Gihan Dias
CEO
LK Domain Registry