Well, I was unclear. I was referring to the policy of the national IR? Who sets that policy? Actually, what is the national IR? National government? Who gives the national IR authority?
Do you know how nations get ccTLDs?
Hint: We have UN.
To bring in the governments into an address policy discussion should qualify for application of Godwin's law. "The thread has ended here".
So, we don't have ccTLDs. OK.
This is terribly confused. In fact, nations get ccTLDs by accepting incoming international mail, i.e. letters and parcels. Any area of the world that has a postal system which receives incoming mail, also has a two-letter code assigned by the Universal Postal Union. They aren't terribly concerned about political divisions when making the code allocations. The important thing is that the area must have a separate postal system and since Taiwan has a postal system separate from the People's Republic of China, it also gets a UPU code. Same thing for Hong Kong. And mainland France also had a code until recently (MF) to distinguish it from the French overseas departments and territories which all have their own individual codes. IANA and ICANN simply refer to the UPU list to decide whether or not to give out a ccTLD. They prefer to give the ccTLD to an administrator who has the support of the majority of Internet users in the ccTLD area and there is a dispute procedure to sort out arguments. If necessary, governments can win those disputes but it usually is not necessary for governments to get involved at all because the independent ccTLD organizations in most countries try to do a good enough job that nobody complains about them. Strangely enough, this is not that different from the RIR system. --Michael Dillon