Achtung! It's the African SS.

July 9, 2011 will mark many birthdays, one much more noticed than that of others: the birth of a nation. After 99% of people voted for independence from Sudan in a referendum earlier in the year, the Republic of South Sudan will become the world's newest nation on that summer day.

The problems that lie ahead should be familiar for the news generation that watched the birth of the former Soviet republics, the new countries that rose from the ashes of Yugoslavia, East Timor and most recently, the still 'semi-nation' of Kosovo. Establishing a government, figuring out what to import and what to export, how to educate your people, even what flag to fly and song to sing can be long and tedious processes.

But what most people don't realize is the even more seemingly menial tasks that have to be undertaken. For example, South Sudan will have to arrange for its mail to be delivered to the correct place by registering with the Universal Postal Union, and for a place in organizations such as the International Maritime Organization, even though it doesn't have a coastline (neither to around a third of the other members, so no matter). Meanwhile, in New York, the United Nations will have to decide whether to kick the Vatican City or the Palestinian Authority back to the observer seats to make a place for what is now a 'real country'.

In this interconnected world, however, one of the smallest and yet most significant tasks is to register with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in Geneva, Switzerland. It is here that countries are allocated their two-letter country codes that, with a few exceptions, go on to become a nation's top-level domain.

The ISO code is used to identify the country quickly, and as written above, makes up those two letters at the end of a website or email address. As the dominant language of the ISO (and of the internet) is English, countries can either choose to have a code that represents their name in English (Greece is GR despite their name being closer to the word Elliniki or Hellenic, Japan is Nippon but uses JP, etc) or a name that represents its name in the official language of that country (Germany is DE from Deutschland, Spain uses ES from Espana).

South Sudan is the latest country to have to deal with this process, except that they face an especially difficult task: 's' is an extremely common letter in English, the language upon which the majority of ISO codes are based. The two best choices, SD and SU are already taken: the former by archenemy Sudan, and the latter represents the Soviet Union and is still held by the Russian Federation. In fact, a quick look at the chart below shows the lack of choices:

The only code that seems to work, and work very well to be fair, is SS. But of course nothing is ever that simple in world politics. It has already been noted that SS carries negative connotations due to its association with Adolf Hitler's elite unit of soldiers in Nazi Germany. No surprises there, but what is more it seems that this reason will be sufficient enough to reject South Sudan's request for the assignment of SS.

Isn't this a bit much though, really? I can understand fears of droves of neo-Nazis across the world scrabbling to register .ss top-level domains, but how big of a problem could this really turn into? Surely we all realize that too-level domain is controlled by the country who uses it, therefore giving the South Sudanese government total control over who registers under their domain. Anyway, if every white supremacist group registers with a .ss top-level domain, it makes them all much, much easier to block by people who don't wish to let others read their hate-mongering.

On the same subject, how then did Denmark get the go-ahead for DK and which idiot gave the Falkland Islands permission to register FK? Because, after all, they do sound remarkably similar to English swear words...

Who knows what other top-level domains could mean in other languages anyway? For all we are aware, there could be thousands of negative historical references, swear words or insults contained within the above table.

We don't worry because of a reason - it wasn't intended that way. And South Sudan is just looking for an two-letter code to use as a top-level domain, not to bring about a Nazi renaissance on the world wide web. Should they get stuck with a code that doesn't represent their nation and that is hard to remember, just because of a distant connection made by a Eurocentric organization to unrelated events in history?

Continuing with the anti-ISO rant, I also wonder why they didn't just choose three-letter codes to use when they started, to save these problems? Three-letter codes do in fact exist, but are nowhere as popular. Using the English alphabet, there are 676 combinations of two letters. Considering that the world has approximately 193 nations, numerous territories and other organization that desire ISO codes, it's easy to see that they could eventually all be used up.By contrast, there are 17,576 combinations of three letters - try using all of those up!

And just to prove that this grumpy blogger is happy to target anyone, I ask to the people of South Sudan: why such a boring name? While it may seem a logical choice for naming a country that occupies the southern part of Sudan, it's really unimaginative. Confusing too: now we'll have to make a distinction between South Sudan (a country) and southern Sudan (the south of Sudan), just like we already do with South Africa and southern Africa. Coincidentally, South Africa is the only other nation in the world to use a geographical compass point in its name, which demonstrates what a boring choice such names are!

So, in summary, ISO, please give South Sudan the name it wants - it's just been born for goodness sake, doesn't it already have enough to deal with? Should they be punished for being so boring?