[urn] Re: Proposal: Activation of RFC 8141 Section 5.1 R eserved NIDs via a Territorial URN Framework

This is quite interesting.  I think the next step is to flesh out what
the "formal proposal" is, as your initial e-mail is rather sparse in
details.

Ultimately, this requires an RFC to update RFC 8141.  Since RFC 8141 is
Standards Track, the new RFC would have to be also.

You talk about the syntax of the new class of URNs but you don't
specify it very clearly.  IIUC, the base is to define
"urn:<country-code>:..." to be a class of URNs whose allocation is
delegated to "the authorities" of the country/territory/etity with that
ISO alpha-2 code <country-code>.

I think beyond that, you intend to specify that *all* of these URNs will
have the format "urn:<country-code>:<id-type>:<id>", where <id-type> is
a code for a type of identifier issued by the authorities of
<country-code>, and <id> is one of those identifiers.

At first sight, this seems to be restrictive, in that there can't be any
country-specific URNs that aren't country-issued IDs.  But on second
thought, that isn't really a restriction, as any country-specific URN
namespace is a "type of identifier issued by the authorities".

Of course, with URNs a lot of the definition is defining how the space
is administered.  (Hence we are talking about this proposal here!)  So
there needs to be some systematic registration of the delegations for
<country-code>s to suitable "national registries", with each national
registrar formally undertaking to administer the allocation of the
<id-type> "sub-namespaces".

There is the messy political problem of when the
government/territory/authority for particular <country-code> changes.
But the registrar of ISO.3166 has to make such decisions, and the IETF
can simply copy ISO's actions.  But even when the political entity for a
<country-code> is well-defined (because we copy the ISO), how do we
choose the registrar entity?  If the recognized government of the
country designates a registrar, that's reasonably simple, but e.g. I can
easily imagine the US federal government to not care and it falls by
default to ANSI ... and a decade later, some other organization disputes
the designation.

Dale

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