The Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society has been invited by the Ministry of Public Administration (MPA) to  a consultation on the .tt country code Top Level Domain policy this Wednesday. From the text of the invitation :

“The .tt ccTLD is the country code top level domain for Trinidad and Tobago. A country code top level domain is an Internet top-level domain, generally used or reserved for a country or a dependent territory. ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and currently all two-letter top-level domains are ccTLDs. Creation and delegation of ccTLDs is performed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and generally corresponds to the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes maintained by the United Nations.

In some countries they are very popular (.de is the most popular, second only to .com in number of registrations), less so in others. Some countries use the ccTLD as a revenue generator (.tv) while others use it as a national resource and for country branding (.uk, .au). In general, .tt is little known either inside or outside the country, and there has been little interest among most of the local Internet stakeholders in its use or policies.

The Trinidad and Tobago government has been working on a process to develop a plan for local policy development for the Trinidad and Tobago ccTLD – .tt. It has been run for many years by the ttNIC (a local company), but the time has come to have a national consensus multi-stakeholder policy for the local management of this Internet resource, and an inclusive and transparent consultative process to get there.

The key objective of this consultation is to get the views of Internet stakeholders on the major policy issues that inform the management of the .tt ccTLD. Other objectives of this consultation include:

• To present models for ccTLD management

• To discuss guidelines and best practices for ccTLD management
• To discuss potential for re-delegation of the .tt ccTLD from the current administrator (TTNIC)
• To identify prioritised actions, processes and indicative schedules for developing the .tt ccTLD as a national resource”

There have been many posts on this to the TTCS discussion mailing list (scroll to the bottom of the page for the responses). Your thoughts?