[ietf-provreg] Country codes (another EPP Document Update)

[Andrew Sullivan <andrew@ca.afilias.info>]

I just remembered that there's one more annoyance that I've forgotten
to mention, but I think we'd benefit from addressing.

RFC 3733 requires (in section 2.4.3) that registrant country be
represented by the ISO 3166 country code.

The problem is, as I'm sure everyone is aware, that the ISO 3166
rules permit not only the obsolescence of a country code, but its
reassignment.  The possibility that a country code will come to refer
to some other country seems to be conceptually broken for our
purposes, because while countries go out of existence (and their
country code is deleted), the addresses often don't change (and even
if they did, there's be precious little way of getting the data from
the contact if one interacts with the person corresponding to the
contact object indirectly).  Formally speaking, this means that
allowing (for instance) YU in an address is not permitted today, even
though it was correct when the address was created.  This is of
course a pain, because the country code is valid at one date, and
becomes invalid later.

I know that people elsewhere in the IETF are struggling with this
problem for considerably more important cases than this one; but is
there anything we can do about it now, while we're looking at these
documents?

A
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Andrew Sullivan                         204-4141 Yonge Street
Afilias Canada                        Toronto, Ontario Canada
<andrew@ca.afilias.info>                              M2P 2A8
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