http://www.adlawbyrequest.com/international/au61801.shtml
The last sentence seems to have explained a lot.
<quote>
Why This Matters: When scientists first created the
domain name system, the U.S. bodies that administered
the Internet did not consider ccTLDs to be the property
of their respective countries. Long after many ccTLDs
were assigned to private individuals, Australian
representative to ICANN Paul Twomey suggested that
two-letter country codes should be considered the
sovereign property of national governments. Several
countries have recently asked ICANN to force private
ccTLD administrators to turn over the codes. If ICANN
acts, it would in effect grant ownership of all ccTLDs to
national governments.
</quote>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.1 : Fri Aug 31 2001 - 03:10:02 EST