Dear all,

I am sorry that it was impossible for me to attend the last teleconference the24th August. I was in China on holiday, on a hotel with really bad Internet connection, and it was 4 a.m. Chinese time. 

I have read the transcripts from the call and have a few comments:

First and most important, I agree with you in the way you decided to move forward from here. It would be an advantage to have the view of the community on the treatment on 2-letter codes before we move on to 3-letter codes. If we manage to get this settled in Dublin, that would be excellent. 

Even if we haven´t really started to discuss 3-letter codes yet, I just wanted to make a comment on an input to the applicant guidebook mentioned by Jeff. There are rules in the guidebook that has been followed in the first round.  In Module 2, 2.2.1.4.1.Treatment of Country or Territory Names, litre i) it is made clear that:

Applications for strings that are country or territory names will not be approved, as they are not available under the New gTLD Program in this application round. A string shall be considered to be a country or territory name if:

1. it is an alpha-3 code listed in the ISO 3166-1 standard.

This does not mean that this will be the result in the future, but so far this has been followed. 3-letter strings, like xyz and cat, have been assigned. But they were not on the ISO 3166-1 alpha 3-code list. During the application round there were applications for 3-letter strings that were denied, because they were on this list, such as .and.

We also know that among the original gTLDs the 3-letter code for COMORES was taken for .com. But this is the only one, as far as I know, and I do not think anyone would be confused here and think that .com is representing Comores. .com is long time ago incorporated as a representation for commercial. So you could argue that that ship has sailed already.

On the other hand, .com has never pretended representing Comores. 

Kind regards,

Annebeth, co-chair representing ccNSO