ICANN’s board of directors will vote on removal of the top-level domain .TP from the DNS root zone on February 12. No preliminary discussions were scheduled. This means that consensus has been reached and the decision is practically made.
In the early days of the Internet, when domain system was being formed, it was decided to use international standard ISO 3166 that determines code names for the states and dependent territories for the country code domains. So the name .TP was given to the domain of the country known now as East Timor (second name - Timor-Leste). At the time its territory was occupied by Indonesia, in international documents the colonial name of the country - Portuguese Timor (that’s why it’s TP - Timor Português) - was still used.
Domain .TP was delegated in 1997, however, in 2002 the country gained independence and in the international standard ISO 3166 is was called TL (Timor-Leste). Corresponding domain was delegated by ICANN to the government of Eastern Timor in 2005. Soon after that registration in the .TP domain was closed, all the owners of domains in that zones received the same domain names in .TL. Current decision of ICANN means that after 10 years of parallel existence of .TP and .TL the domain of the country that doesn’t exist any more, will finally be removed from the root zone.
