Adam Roach <[email protected]> writes:

> On 5/12/15 12:11, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
>> On 5/12/15 12:45 PM, Fred Wenzel wrote:
> ...
>>
>>> I suggest the following:
>>> - After a few years of deliberation, let's land Kosovo with country code
>>> "xk" in product details. It'll just be in there, no one needs to
>>> use it if
>>> they don't want to. I am still happy to patch and land that 1-liner
>>> patch.
>>> - We can then suggest to the Mozillians in question that they can choose
>>> Kosovo as their country if they so desire, but they are not required to.
>>
>> This sounds great to me, given the limited information I have here..
>
> We should not be taking actions that make it look like Mozilla is
> trying to independently determine what is and what isn't a country.
>
> Delegating this determination to a body like ISO is reasonable and
> safe, which is why organizations like IANA rely rather strictly on
> ISO's assignments [1]. In particular, we should avoid making political
> statements -- no matter how unintentional -- by omitting official
> codes (like SS) or including unofficial ones (such as XK).

The ISO-3166 standard is controversial. It only presents the member
states' view. Many organizations have already changed to use regions
instead of countries because of this issue. See
http://iso3166.github.io/ for some of them.

> This means that we should act with reasonable haste to update our own
> records whenever ISO issues an update, and we should reproduce the
> officially assigned list verbatim. For ease of automation, there is a
> subscription service (~US$350/year) provided by ISO for this purpose;
> see https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:pub:PUB500001:en
>
> The danger with the proposal above is that adding an unofficial code
> sets a precedent that puts Mozilla in the position of having to make
> judgement calls if someone were to request that we add X* country
> codes for places like Tibet, Northern Cyprus, Chechnya, Catalonia,
> Kurdistan, and ISIL. I'm not saying that any of these situations are
> directly comparable to Kosovo; merely that each has a set of political
> considerations that Mozilla is not in a position to safely evaluate.
>
> ____
> [1] From RFC 1951, section 4: "The IANA is not in the business of
> deciding what is and what is not a country. The selection of the ISO
> 3166 list as a basis for country code top-level domain names was made
> with the knowledge that ISO has a procedure for determining which
> entities should be and should not be on that list."
_______________________________________________
governance mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance

Reply via email to