Where does .IE come from?

FreekyGeek

This seems like a silly general knowledge question but, where does the .IE come from in Irish domain names?

.UK = United Kingdom
.IT = Italy
.FR = France

Why wasn't is .IR for Ireland or .EI for Éire???

Agent Smith

ireland eire

IE

zenith

ISO country codes, with some fecking around by some vested interests. That's why the UK is .uk, rather than .gb

http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html
is the ISO list

and IANAs
http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld-whois.htm

Blaster99

It could also be that Ireland is one of the newer countries in the world and IR was possibly assigned to another country, Iraq perhaps. Mind you, Iraq is also a fairly recent invention so maybe that theory is bollocks. I've rented cars in the States where the agent used the wrong country code and the receipt was sent through Iraq a couple of times. This was back in the days when Iraq functioned so I got them in the end.

Moriarty

It's a mixture of ISO country codes and real world politiking. For instance, there's a number of country code top level domains that dont have a country to go with them - the likes of .ps for palestine, or the upcoming .eu for europe.

Moved over to Nets/Comms.

Goodshape

Blaster99 wrote:

IR was possibly assigned to another country, Iraq perhaps.

Iran apparently. Iraq is IQ.

Quite happy with IE myself. Sounds nice.

Capt'n Midnight

.EU may be one line in the next few months ( www.register.co.uk )
up to 5 years of wrangling so far

Lots of interesting stories about domain name politics
I like the one about the Pitcarin Islands where they got every adult on the registered domain to complain about the person who holds the rights to it.

Yeah there are several ISO's for different things (the good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from) for internet / x400 / phone numbers etc.

Snowbat

Work on ISO 3316 started in 1968
The State of Iraq dates from 1919-1920
Use of the country name Iran in the west dates from 1935

mneylon

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

.EU may be one line in the next few months

I wouldn't hold my breath!

If it was simply a matter of ICANN it would have been live by now, but the EU are involved, so it's taking forever for them to decide on anything

Dinner

IR is Iran so we have IE. I like it. I dont like the idea of .EU though.

Superman

Arabel wrote:

IR is Iran so we have IE. I like it. I dont like the idea of .EU though.

HANDS OFF BRUSSELS!

Itys a bit like alot of crap easter products (well may not all) just carry the "made in E.U." logo instead of "made in Krakow"

Gavin

Bit of info on history of .ie at
http://computing.dcu.ie/~humphrys/net.80s.html

Gav

lk_

Err it comes from Indigo Echo....not because ir was taken.....

Something to do with air traffic control years ago..........

kdouglas

well Indigo Echo is just the phonetic alphabet way of saying IE, as used on radio comms... but if the .ie domain came from the air traffic control using IE, then why did they use IE??

the Ireland/Eire argument makes the most sense to me,

and just to throw it in: what about .ID ?? Ireland??? just like the car reg plates (Wicklow = WW etc...)

jm2k

It wasn't invented by the French by any chance? ...in which case IE would be short for Irlande

Snowbat

IACO airport codes and Irish aircraft registrations both use EI. I don't recall any aviation references to IE. If there were, perhaps they used ISO 3316?