.TP domain will be deleted

    The number of national domain zones will decrease in the near future, as ICANN plans to remove the .TP domain.

    On February 12, the ICANN Board of Directors will make a final decision on the removal of the .TP domain delegated to the state of Portuguese Timor. The meeting will document the consensus among ICANN management, and there will be no debate on this topic.

    The .TP domain has an interesting history. When John Postel and other pioneers in the domain industry delegated national domain zones, they relied on the ISO 3166 standard, the official list of abbreviations for UN names. East Timor, which was occupied by Indonesia, at that time had only one official name: Portuguese Timor. It has remained from the time when this territory was a colony of Portugal.

    Therefore, in 1997, the .TP domain was delegated to East Timor.

    After Indonesia and the international community recognized East Timor as an independent state, in 2002 it received the official abbreviation TL (Timor-Leste).

    In 2005, ICANN delegated the .TL domain, while the registration of names in the .TP zone was suspended, and most of the domains were transferred to the new zone.

    Now the old domain will be permanently removed from the root zone.

    It is also interesting that at the time of the delegation of the .TP domain, Xanana Gusmao, who was at that time in prison after being sentenced to life imprisonment, was listed as the head of the domain zone. Gusmao was the leader of the East Timor liberation movement, which was captured by the authorities. After the state gained independence, Gusmao became the first president of East Timor and ruled from 2002 to 2007. Now he is the prime minister.

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