RE: Question on ECML address country code usage

[Eastlake III Donald-LDE008 <Donald.Eastlake@motorola.com>]

No, the United States of America is one "national" jurisdiction. It permits
a vast profusion (well over 550) of subsidiary jurisdictions (cities,
counties, states, indian areas, special districts, free-ports, gores, etc.)
within it each of which is limited to the amount of individuality that is
permitted them by the USA. Furthermore, the use of ISO3166 codes is a way of
avoid any burden on the IETF of deciding what is a country and its use is
long established in the DNS and in other protocols, IETF and non-IETF.

And, perhaps most important of all, it is well defined and interoperable.

It seems to me that the way to go is ISO3166 country codes with a
supplementary "additional jurisdictional information" field to be used when
you need to specify more than the ISO country code plus the address
information.

Donald

-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine
[mailto:brunner@nic-naa.net]
Sent: Thursday, August 22, 2002 6:54 AM
To: lauri.piikivi@nokia.com
Cc: ietf-trade@lists.elistx.com; brunner@nic-naa.net
Subject: Re: Question on ECML address country code usage

Lauri,

There are about 550 national jurisdictions contained in, or surrounded by,
the United States. ISO 3166 (aka "country codes") provides few code points
for distinguishing code points in North America.

As a protocol design issue, using two octets to contain fewer than 300
distinct data values, and mandating failure, or implementation-specific
extension, for transactions taking place within the jurisdictions of Indian
(not India) governments (but not Pitcairn's Island or any of the other odd
bits in ISO 3166), is both untidy and an overspecification.

We aren't in the buisness of deciding what is a state.

We don't need to pay a great deal of attention to the claims of others who
are in that business. Very likely, their decisions are political, and not
technical, and of necessity, not correct.

It is a good thing that iso3166 code points aren't used in ip addrs. If they
were, even getting address allocations for Indian Country would be
difficult.

Eric