.an

~ the goodbye ~

A country dissolved on 10 October 2010 and its two letters kept resolving for another four years and nine months. That gap is the whole story here. Everything else about.an is administrative.

The Netherlands Antilles was a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, five islands in the Caribbean under one government, and it received.an in 1993 when country-code suffixes were being handed out to anyone with a two-letter code in the ISO list. The registry sat at the University of the Netherlands Antilles, which was normal for the era. A university computing department ran the nameservers because a university computing department was the only place in the country that knew how.

When the government was wound up in October 2010, the islands went in different directions constitutionally, and the ISO code AN went with the government. Curaçao was assigned.cw and Sint Maarten was assigned.sx. The remaining three islands became part of the Netherlands proper and were given.bq, which was allocated and never opened for public registration, so it exists as a delegation with nothing behind it.

As of November 2010 there were still over 800 names registered under.an, including second-level delegations that large companies had picked up out of habit. By the time the removal came around, that number was closer to twenty.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a country that stopped existing ~

Retiring a country-code domain is slow on purpose. The suffix is not the property of the registry, it is a pointer that other people's software has written down, and switching it off breaks mail routing and every recorded link belonging to organizations that did nothing wrong. So IANA runs a phase-out with dates that get pushed.

The university started clearing inactive names at the end of 2013. A removal date of 31 October 2014 came and went. The Dutch asked for a second extension out to October 2015, and after discussions at the ICANN meeting in Buenos Aires that request either failed or was withdrawn, which left 31 July 2015 as the actual end..an was the second country-code suffix pulled that year, after.tp went with Portuguese Timor.

By 2015 the surviving.an addresses were mostly redirects. Whoever still had one was pointing it at something under.nl or.com or one of the two new island suffixes. Google and Visa had second-level registrations sitting there, some without working address records, parked out of the same defensive reflex that makes a company register its own name in every suffix it can find.

So the deletion cost almost nothing. Twenty registrants, most already gone. This is what a well-run retirement looks like: the thing dies after everyone has finished needing it, and the only people who notice are the ones who keep lists.

~ what a two-letter suffix is worth ~

I have no personal history with.an and would be inventing one if I claimed otherwise. What I do have is the Turkish version of the same object. In Turkey the country suffix was administered out of a university for decades, and the reputation of.com.tr among anyone who tried to get one was that you needed documentation proving you had a right to the name before anybody would talk to you. That was true well past the point where the rest of the world could register anything in a minute with a credit card.

Which is the part worth sitting with. A country-code suffix is not a brand, it is a jurisdiction rendered as text, and the rules attached to it come from whoever the state handed the keys to. When the state goes away, the text has to go away too, even though the text is just two characters and never hurt anyone..an lasted five years past its own government on nothing but the inconvenience of removing it.

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