In uk.d-i-y Huge wrote:

Because the ISO are looking to charge for use of such codes, and it's
not worth the risking the licensing costs?

Yeah. Right. Buy better drugs.

Bizarre though it sounds, the relevant sub-vomittee (a typo, but too
appropriate to correct) of ISO *has* made an ill-judged and (hopefully)
ill-phrased pronouncement about collecting "database publishing charges"
on the *use* of (maybe only complete and up-to-date collections of?)
two-letter country codes. Yes, like in geographical top-level domains.
Yes, like in MIME tags for languages on web pages.

Clue-by-fours are being vigorously administered by the W3C, ICANN, and
other bodies representing (some aspects of) the interests of Net users.
There's probably a suitably incredulous article by John Leyden at
theregister.co.uk by now...

Just remember - in international standardisation bodies as in party
politics, just because an idea is patently loony on its face doesn't
mean it won't get proposed in all apparent seriousness...

Stefek, driftin' along, aiming as always to both entertain and inform ;-)