Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 
To: Oliver Smoot <osmoot@itic.org> 
Subject: IAB comment on stability of ISO 3166 and other infrastructure standards 
From: Leslie Daigle <leslie@thinkingcat.com> 
CC: iab@ietf.org

To: Oliver Smoot, President, ISO.
September 26, 2003.

The recent decision by the maintenance agency for ISO 3166 to re-assign “cs” (formerly Czechoslovakia) to Serbia and Montenegro can cause problems on the Internet in the form of URIs which include the old TLD “cs” (as belonging to Czechoslovakia) potentially today referring to a different object in Serbia and Montenegro. Similar problems can arise in any protocol which uses domain names (which is about every protocol we have). One last example is email addresses stored in local users’ address books and on business cards. There are definitely old cards with the old version of “cs” still out there.

We urge ISO 3166/MA to as soon as practically possible revoke the assignment, and further to adopt a policy to only reuse Infrastructural Codes if that is really needed (such as if the number of available codes is very low) and after a long period of time (such as 200 years).

Best regards,

Leslie Daigle,
Chair, Internet Architecture Board.