it was sometime in mid-95 that the internet policy changed from arbitrary/anarchy/discovery routing to hierarchical routing ... because of the increasing difficulty of doing a totally unique routing discovery for all possible ip-packets.

you could take your domain name with you ... but DNS would be updated so that the domain name mapped to a different place in the IP address hierarchy.

You could use the (unique) ITU codes as a prefix for the bank account number. Hence, Irish bank account numbers would have 353 appended to them, Dutch would have 31, British 44, German 49, Italian, 39, French 33 and so on. Then it wouldn't matter what the system of a country would be, because all one would need to do is look at the prefix.

Hasan, do you know, this is exactly what DigiCash tried to do with their currencies.

Actually, I think the banks would prefer to use the ISO 3-digit codes, as they hate the idea of any other sector telling them what to do ...

But, it still wouldn't work. Occasionally the state numbers change. And, worse, sometimes the state changes, often enough that it is a real pain. In this case, the banks have been told that they need to start thinking about doing cross-border portability. This all on the top of their just completed conversion to the Euro, all at the banks' expense thank you very much.

It's in the paper, it really is a laugh.