> > At http://www.itu.int/net/cctlds/nics.htm is a preliminary survey 
> > conducted by ITU of Internet ISO 3166-based top level domains.
> 
> This seems to be the whois data frozen in immutable form.  
> Though it seems to also have a URL if the form is available online.
> 
> Freezing the data in immutable form seems counterproductive 
> and somewhat dangerous.  Please clarify the benefits/goals here.

Well, it started like this...

The ITU gets a request about once a week along the lines "where is the 
NIC for so and so". We had no place to point them to as the whois data
didn't have this. So I asked one of my assistants to collect this 
information by contacting the listings in the whois database and we'd
make this information publicly available.

When she started, she discovered that the whois data is often out of
date - she found that about 50% of the whois records are wrong 
in some form (listing people who had died, left companies several years 
ago, invalid email addresses/telephone/fax numbers, etc...). So I told 
her to try to carefully collect this information and then we'd ship it 
off the database to IANA and hopefully get things up-to-date (which 
we've done). 

The web pages are auto-generated from this database. There's more in the

database which we will slowly move out into the html pages (e.g., today,

country names in three languages were added, later we'll add who is 
sovereign over various small territories). As soon as the authoritative 
data really is, we'll just point to that, and just list the extra info 
we've collected. 

Robert
--
Robert Shaw <robert.shaw&#167;itu.int>
Advisor, Global Information Infrastructure
International Telecommunication Union <http://www.itu.int>
Place des Nations, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland