I found this bit of ICANN information fascinating:

Yet North Korean isolation in the internet world may not be a complete product of its own doing. For example, the state has persistently asked ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, to authorise the domain ".kp" for the country - but to no avail.

Does anyone know anything about these "persistent" requests to ICANN? I'd like to see one. Shouldn't the requests be public anyway?

Here's where it gets a bit more interesting. .KP is on the IANA Root Zone Whois index, but the specific entry does not list any delegee. And .KP is not in the root zone. So why carry an entry in the Whois for a TLD that has not been delegated?

Does it mean anything at all that the .KP page on the IANA website was "last updated" on September 16, 2006? Questions, questions, questions. The answers may tell us something about the politics and points of control behind ICANN.