ICANN Signs Up Disappearing Nation
The Netherlands Antilles, an agglomeration of former Dutch colonies in the Caribbean, will disappear on October 10, 2010. None of the ex-colonies in question — Curaçao, St Maarten, Saba, Bonaire, and St Eustatius — have been particularly happy with the status quo. (Aruba achieved a separate status in 1986).
Sources at the International Standards Organization (ISO), which maintains the ISO-3166-1 list that determines which ccTLDs exist (or don’t), tell me that .AN (Netherlands Antilles) will be deprecated, and two new ccTLD codes will be established. Presumably, these will be for St Maarten and Curaçao (the others have taken the status of Dutch municipalities), but I wasn’t able to confirm the countries or the new ccTLD codes.
Meanwhile, ICANN is ballyhooing the signing of an “accountability framework” with Netherlands Antilles — even though it has a shelf-life of just over four months.
Can anyone guess what the new country codes will be? .SM for St Maarten and .CU for Curaçao seem obvious, but these are already taken by San Marino and Cuba.
It seems reasonable to think that Curaçao’s cctld could be .cç. St. Maarten on the other hand, will prove to be a challenge. I believe that symbols beyond a-z should be considered as propose for Curaçao.
@Pablo – good idea, but unfortunately .cc (without the cedilla) is taken by the Cocos Islands. The ISO-3166-1 list doesn’t support accented characters, so .cç wouldn’t work…
St. Maarten has chosen .movie and Curaçao has picked the controversial .liquor TLD. They both feel that two characters is limiting.
@Peter – if only! Interest in ccTLDs would go way up!
.cw seems a more likely ccTLD for Curaçao, as Aruba has .aw (I’m guessing the W stands for “West Indies”). I don’t see any better alternatives. Sint Maarten can have .sx, as SXM is the IATA code for its airport, is a popular name for the island, and is the official code of the Sint Maarten national football team.
CW looks likely, but maybe not unlikely to use the island’s Papimentu name “Kòrsou”. Basing ISO 3166 on non-“international” country names is not unhead of — cf. the case of Croatia’s HR (from Hrvatska).