“Territories of the Indian Ocean” which had been internationally recognized as a political entity and is no more.

An important consideration is what if something becomes internationally recognized with that two character abbreviation? How is it IANA’s business to disagree with the world?

Country code domains are decided by international agreement on two character abbreviations per country, and IANA needs to abide by that.

For example, can you imagine IANA caught In the middle of whether ‘.cn’ should be owned by China or Taiwan? What a disaster that would be. Their only sustainable approach is to stay out of it, and just follow what the UN says

An important piece of history missing from this article is that back when IANA was formalized, they realized they couldn’t be the ones to arbitrate country level domains. There was already an international organization formalizing two character codes for country names, so they basically said that would be the decider.

In the same way, it’s not up to them whether to recognize a country’s existence, they rely on that international agreement and they need to abide by that

I downvoted because

• a couple of those nut cases are known racists we’re all already complaining about. Can you really paint the whole country for racist things said by people whom half the population is already calling racist
• I’m generally suspicious of articles that call out democrats just before election. Yeah, they’re in power when it happens but the other political side claim they would be worse, so calling out Democrats just before election is too much like interference

A few bad actors l, like Schmidt, have been delaying the work of thousands of hardworking people who care. This has continued for decades, making a once solvable problem almost intractable. Further delay is the worst possible choice