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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

  > AFAIK those fall entirely under the jurisdiction of the respective UN recognized government

How does that work for e.g. Taiwan, where the UN recognises the mainland government's claim to sovereignty in practice?

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It's complicated and political, like always. Officially, the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code list is used to decide who gets a ccTLD. (And Taiwan is included there.) But for example ".su" still exists for historical reasons, even though the Soviet Union is long gone (and its code is listed as "exceptionally reserved", which I assume translates as "we have no fucking idea what to do here.")

This raises an interesting question. If they aren't strictly following UN recognition then would it be possible for ICANN to award control to one party while the UN recognizes an opposing party as the legitimate government?

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