Toilet Paper Test not to blame as .tp faces deletion
The DNS root zone file is set to shrink, albeit only temporarily, with ICANN planning to delete the redundant ccTLD .tp in the coming weeks.
ICANN’s board of directors plans to vote on “Removal of the .TP top-level domain representing Portuguese Timor” on February 12. It’s on the consensus agenda, meaning there won’t be any detailed discussion of the motion.
The ccTLD has an interesting history.
When Jon Postel and the original DNS pioneers decided to use the UN’s ISO 3166 list as the official reference point for ccTLD codes, the country known as East Timor, at the time under Indonesian occupation, was officially only recognized as Portuguese Timor, its old colonial name.
Thus, in 1997, .tp was delegated to represent East Timor.
After an independent East Timor was formally recognized as a sovereign state by Indonesia and the international community, it was assigned the TL code by ISO 3166 in 2002.
IANA/ICANN delegated .tl to the East Timor government in 2005, and shortly thereafter the .tp registry stopped accepting new registrations, migrating existing .tp domains to the new ccTLD.
Now, it seems .tp is finally set to be removed from the root entirely.
While .tp was managed by an Irish company, the administrative contact was originally listed as Xanana Gusmao — at the time a senior resistance fighter serving a life sentence in an Indonesian jail.
Gusmao, who is still listed as .tp’s admin contact, went on to be East Timor’s first president from 2002 to 2007. Since 2007, he’s been the country’s prime minister.
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