[Spray3610]

ICANN does not pick the abbreviations. ISO does.

[actionfromafar]

It's odd ISO has such a control to effect an countries income just by choosing a good abbreviation. I doubt the creators of the DNS system had any idea that domains would arbitrarily give some countries an extra form of income, profiting from people who could care less about the country it was created for. Why didn't ISO just charge a flat fee for any string to resolve to an IP?

[dharmab]

ISO created the country codes in 1974, prior to the invention of DNS.

[pcthrowaway]

Surely some of these country codes have come about after the dawn of DNS.

I wonder if we'll see newly formed countries angling for names that will get valuable abbreviations

[actionfromafar]

Haha, this is both informative and deadpan. Thanks. :)

[reactordev]

This is what tech debt looks like when it’s middle aged and has kids of its own.

[sdsd]

i get why people are downvoting this, because it is snarky, but i laughed so hard. so thanks for posting this, despite the hit to your internet points

[srhngpr]

ISO3166-1 alpha-2 to be exact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2