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- “No timeline” to retire Soviet Union from the DNS
- ICANN to kill off 60-day domain transfer lock
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- Tucows quits ICANN’s Whois disclosure pilot
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- Second new gTLD contention set revealed
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- Registries have started shutting down Whois
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- Did Trump just create the world’s next ccTLD?
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Did Trump just create the world’s next ccTLD?
Could there be a .gz?
I’m sometimes happy that DI has such a narrow beat. Today, it means I don’t have to discuss the legal, political, moral or ethical implications of US President Donald Trump’s just-announced plan for Gaza.
At a press conference last night, Trump said he wants the Palestinians to leave Gaza, to be resettled elsewhere in the region, and for the US to “take over” the territory and have a “long-term ownership position” on it.
The details of Trump’s aspiration are not immediately clear. Is he talking about a military occupation? Annexation? Does he just want to build another golf course?
It’s almost certainly too early to speculate, so let’s speculate.
With Trump talking about US ownership of Gaza, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Gaza’s future, should his plan come to fruition, is as a US territory, or something very much like one.
Populated territories of any nation in general get their own ccTLD. Puerto Rico’s .pr and Guam’s .gu are two examples of US territories with their own ccTLDs.
The US annexation of Gaza would not necessarily even have to be legal under international law or recognized by America’s peers in the United Nations to create the possibility of a new ccTLD.
The path to the root involves a lot of buck-passing and at no point includes a qualitative evaluation of whether a territory is legal or otherwise deserving of recognition.
As you may know, ICANN’s IANA department is responsible for adding and removing ccTLDs from the DNS root, but it takes its cues from the International Organization for Standardization.
Under long-standing IANA convention known as ICP-1, any territory with a two-letter code on the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 list qualifies for a ccTLD. If a registry can show technical nous and local support, it can claim the TLD.
But the ISO takes its cues in turn from the Statistics Division of the United Nations Secretariat, and its M49 standard, “Standard Country or Area Codes for Statistical Use”.
A territory appears on that list as a matter of “statistical convenience” for the UN, and does not imply that the UN or its member states recognize that territory politically.
Palestine itself was granted its ccTLD, .ps, a quarter-century ago, as “Occupied Palestinian Territory”, despite the legal status of the territory being disputed, because UN Stats and ISO decided to put it on their lists.
So Gaza could possibly get its own ccTLD if the US takes it over and splits it from the West Bank, even if it becomes a contested hell-hole where the luxury beachfront hotels are bombed to rubble faster than Trump can build them.
.gz is available, assuming Gaza is not renamed Trumpland or Disneyworld East or something.
A registrar is getting blamed for an Israeli war propaganda site
Israel-based registrar Wix is being blamed for a gory anti-Hamas web site being promoted by Israeli government officials.
A number of recent media reports — notably including this one by usually reliable news wire UPI — have said that Wix is behind the incredibly NSFW web site at hamas.com.
The site is a dark parody of a Hamas fund-raising page, containing disturbing footage of the group’s October 7 atrocities — dead bodies, terrorists taking hostages, shooting dogs and burning homes.
So I imagine Wix would be disturbed to learn it is being credited as the creator of the site, apparently purely because the domain was registered via its registrar and hosted on its hosting service.
“The Israeli software company Wix has created a website to spread anti-Hamas propaganda amid the war in Gaza,” UPI reported, sourcing a GoDaddy Whois lookup that lists Wix as the registrar but shows no registrant information.
A Whois lookup on Wix itself, which should contain information beyond the registry record supplied by GoDaddy, does not reveal any additional information — not even redacted fields — about the registrant.
Hamas usually uses hamas.ps for its web site, but it’s currently down reportedly due to cyber-attacks by pro-Israel hacktivists.
hamas.com has been parked for years by what UPI uncharitably refers to as “cybersquatters”.
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