Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire

oikofuge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 356 posts

Re: When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire

#261

Post by gizajob »

noirscape wrote: post #254
gizajob wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is not using .gb a mistake? The official name of the country is The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - Great Britain is the island containing England, Scotland and Wales. The UK also contains Northern Ireland. It would be nonsensical (technically) for Northern Irish businesses to have domains ending in .gb

Because "uk" isn't in ISO 3166-1 alpha 2, "gb" is, and the formal designation for The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is "gb". It wouldn't be nonsense for northern Irish businesses to have .gb domains, because that's what the ISO convention says it would be. The change will basically never happen though; ICANN has basically acquiesced any attempt to change it (after a weak attempt to do so in the…

Well half of Northern Ireland would happily burn your ISO rulebook to the ground. Plus nobody says “I’m from GB” when abroad, we all say “I’m from the UK”. Country is called UK.

Re: When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire

#262

Post by N19PEDL2 »

noirscape wrote: post #116
hmartin wrote: post #109

But the real question... what will happen with .io TLD? (British Indian Ocean Territory's)

It should eventually get removed by ICANN, since the country code TLDs are managed by ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 (it's however not an exact match), and the transfer will mean the British Indian Ocean Territories will no longer exist. ISO is going to be the entity in charge of removing the io country code, which it probably will do since ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 isn't just used for domain names. There's a standardized process for t…

> It should eventually get removed by ICANN, since the country code TLDs are managed by ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 (it's however not an exact match), and the transfer will mean the British Indian Ocean Territories will no longer exist. ISO is going to be the entity in charge of removing the io country code, which it probably will do since ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 isn't just used for domain names.

Side note: I suspect the real reason Google wants to discontinue goo.gl links is because they believe Trump will eventually succeed in annexing Greenland to the US.

Re: When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire

#263

Post by roryirvine »

noirscape wrote: post #254
gizajob wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is not using .gb a mistake? The official name of the country is The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - Great Britain is the island containing England, Scotland and Wales. The UK also contains Northern Ireland. It would be nonsensical (technically) for Northern Irish businesses to have domains ending in .gb

Because "uk" isn't in ISO 3166-1 alpha 2, "gb" is, and the formal designation for The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is "gb". It wouldn't be nonsense for northern Irish businesses to have .gb domains, because that's what the ISO convention says it would be. The change will basically never happen though; ICANN has basically acquiesced any attempt to change it (after a weak attempt to do so in the…

In the early 2000s I did a bit of consultancy for a company that'd done a deal with Nicaragua's NIC to offer ".co.ni" domains to businesses in Northern Ireland (at the time, the commercial second level domain in Nicaragua was .com.ni, so there wasn't a conflict with existing use).

Unfortunately the venture failed (and I went unpaid!), but the Nicaraguan NIC stepped in to continue service for the handful of .co.ni domains that had been registered at that point.

There'd been a similar effort for Scotland, using both .co.sc and .co.al (for Alba, in Scots Gaelic), but it was even less successful.

These days, there are gTLDs with .scot, .cymru, .wales, and .london existing since 2014-ish. There'll be another round of gTLD applications next year, so I suppose someone might register .unitedkingdom or .ukogbani, but the domain name goldrush days are long over...

Re: When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire

#264

Post by [deleted] »

N19PEDL2 wrote: post #262
noirscape wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should eventually get removed by ICANN, since the country code TLDs are managed by ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 (it's however not an exact match), and the transfer will mean the British Indian Ocean Territories will no longer exist. ISO is going to be the entity in charge of removing the io country code, which it probably will do since ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 isn't just used for domain names. There's a standardized process for t…

> It should eventually get removed by ICANN, since the country code TLDs are managed by ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 (it's however not an exact match), and the transfer will mean the British Indian Ocean Territories will no longer exist. ISO is going to be the entity in charge of removing the io country code, which it probably will do since ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 isn't just used for domain names. Side note: I suspect the real reas…

[deleted]

Re: When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire

#265

Post by gizajob »

roryirvine wrote: post #263
noirscape wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because "uk" isn't in ISO 3166-1 alpha 2, "gb" is, and the formal designation for The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is "gb". It wouldn't be nonsense for northern Irish businesses to have .gb domains, because that's what the ISO convention says it would be. The change will basically never happen though; ICANN has basically acquiesced any attempt to change it (after a weak attempt to do so in the…

In the early 2000s I did a bit of consultancy for a company that'd done a deal with Nicaragua's NIC to offer ".co.ni" domains to businesses in Northern Ireland (at the time, the commercial second level domain in Nicaragua was .com.ni, so there wasn't a conflict with existing use). Unfortunately the venture failed (and I went unpaid!), but the Nicaraguan NIC stepped in to continue service for the handful of .co.ni dom…

Hail our ukogbani overlords.

Sorry to hear you didn’t get paid.

Re: When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire

#266

Post by koakuma-chan »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #197
koakuma-chan wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ICANN periodically lets anyone with $1 million create random new generic TLDs Why? Isn't ICANN non profit?

I'm sure any profit they make is redirected back into the organization's mission.

I still don't get by which virtue they can decide to sell TLDs for 1 million dollars or any other large sum of money. We just ended up having big companies like Google register .google, etc, and random questionable companies register, e.g., .law, .plumbing, etc, presumably for profit. I'm sure ICANN could do better than this.

Re: When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire

#267

Post by seszett »

diggan wrote: post #253
arethuza wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France also has the longest internal scheduled flight - 9,349km https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_longest_domestic_fli...

Had*, seems it was added to work around American Covid restrictions, and it was only active for ~1 month.

You're thinking of the (temporary) Tahiti flight, but that was much longer than 9349 km.

The person you're responding to was talking about the Paris-Réunion flight that has been active for a long time and still active today. I took it 15 years ago when I had to go to Réunion.

Re: When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire

#268

Post by physicsguy »

closewith wrote: post #125
tonymet wrote: post #115

Though empires are out of fashion , British colonies universally benefited from the British empire. The ones who are thriving today owe a huge debt of gratitude, and the languishing ones are that way because they decided not to continue the British tradition. The 20th century decline of the British empire is one of civilization's worst failures, on par with the decline of the Roman Empire.

> Though empires are out of fashion , British colonies universally benefited from the British empire. That's not at all true. There are many examples, but no need to look farther afield than Ireland, which has not yet recovered from the deliberate genocide of the Irish famine. The island of Ireland had not yet reached the population it held pre-famine, and if Ireland had grown at the rate of its neighbours, it would…

> Britain owes a debt to its colonies. The colonies owe nothing to it, except contempt.

There's pretty clearly a distinction between different individual colonies on this one. Something like the Falkland Islands which had no indigenous population is very very different from Jamaica which was a plantation colony full of slaves, which is yet again very different something like Aden (now part of Yemen) which had about 600 people living there at the time it was annexed and which has had a very very difficult post-independence story.

Re: When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire

#269

Post by seszett »

nl wrote: post #182
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wether you agree or not is the entire point. This is not a theoretical question about what could be done. The question is why should it happen in the first place? Why do you think people who have been there for 150 years and ask nothing more than cohabitation should be forcefully removed from a place? As I said, it is not that simple. It has absolutely nothing to do with "the sun setting on the French empire".

> The question is why should it happen in the first place? The OP never indicated if they agreed with the claims or not. They raised it just because it was relevant to the sun setting on the French Empire.

> They raised it just because it was relevant to the sun setting on the French Empire.

New Caledonia becoming independent would not have an effect on this though, the sun would still not set on France, as New Amsterdam and Wallis-et-Futuna are close enough to prevent that and very unlikely to leave France in the foreseeable future.

Re: When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire

#270

Post by toyg »

noirscape wrote: post #260
toyg wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because ccTLDs follow a different standard They will just move .io from ccTLD to gTLD, with the UK government's blessing. Everyone realizes there is no point in stopping the money from flowing.

They probably won't, the 2 character space is reserved for ccTLDs by their existing policies. Only 3 characters and up can be gTLDs.

If the money is good enough, they will make a "grandfathered" exception.

Modern ICANN is not about policies for policies' sake.

Post reply on HN