Interestingly, Kosovo is in multiple organizations that fall under "UN Specialized Agencies" (IMF, World Bank, etc.) and as such should have received a ccTLD over 10-15 years ago as per the UN's rules.
Instead, they have to keep the temporarily assigned .xk which the UN confirmed can never be a permanent ccTLD.
What is going to happen to all .xk sites once the UN finally gets around to publishing the bulletin on Kosovo's country code?
The UN publishes a list of recognised member states. ISO maintains a list of codes. IANA uses that list to determine whether a country code TLD is valid. But that's the extent of the UN's involvement in the governance of the root zone.
There are plenty of TLDs for areas which aren’t countries, whcih don’t claim to be counties, which nobody recognises as countries. .gg and .gu for example.
> The IANA is not in the business of deciding what is and what is not a country. The selection of the ISO 3166 list as a basis for country code top-level domain names was made with the knowledge that ISO has a procedure for determining which entities should be and should not be on that list.
Jon Postel, RFC 1591 (Domain Name System Structure and Delegation)
Taiwan is less recognised by the outside world than Kosovo is, and it has its own country code. Same with Palestine. Having a country code is only weakly related to being a country.
The point is that Taiwan claims to be the legitimate government of the whole of China (being the island where the former government fled to when the Communists took over the rest of the country - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War), and they express that by using "Republic of China" (as opposed to "People's Republic of China"). Similar to how there used to be a "Federal Republic of Germany" and a "German Democratic Republic". You could call both "Germany", but that would be confusing...
It is not confusing at all. Taiwan is a commonly used name for the ROC, and (mainland) China is generally understood as a reference to the PRC.
Since the de facto territories of the two states are common knowledge, you can unambiguously refer to them just by mentioning their rough position on the map. Similarly, East/West Germany were not officially called East/West Germany, and it was not the official name of either country, but people still understood what the words meant.
> The point is that Taiwan claims to be the legitimate government of the whole of China
Not since the early 90s.
Well actually it's a bit more complex since there are multiple parties and they disagree, and there's some nuance (e.g. "one China" but without actually defining what that means, exactly). But "Taiwan claims to be the legitimate government of the whole of China" is woefully outdated and incorrect.
That's mostly a symbolic legal fiction. And I'm guessing here but at least the half of the country who wants to be independent might prefer to be called Taiwan rather than RoC in casual conversation.
> The majority of the UN recognised countries, 106 do not recognize it.
A majority -- 102 of 193 -- UN members do recognize it. You may be counting some (though with your number, I think not all) of the false claims of withdrawal of recognition by other states which have been issued by the governments or state-affiliated media of Serbia and/or Russia, but later refuted by the governments in question, as being true.
Please remove your nationalistic genocidal support from this site for tech talk.
Kosovo will not "go" away just because you like Milosevic decide to murder more Albanians - This is completely disregarding the fact that Serbia is an island of nationalism and revisionism clinging to the past, surrounded by democracies living in the present day.
Serbia will never again have the capacity to execute on these misguided beliefs.
Instead, they have to keep the temporarily assigned .xk which the UN confirmed can never be a permanent ccTLD.
What is going to happen to all .xk sites once the UN finally gets around to publishing the bulletin on Kosovo's country code?