GEOPOLITICAL ENTITIES, NAMES, and CODES (GENC): The Geopolitical Entities, Names, and Codes (GENC) Standard is the US Government-approved profile of names of countries and country subdivisions. Based on ISO 3166 Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions, it specifies an authoritative set of country codes and names for use by the Federal Government for information exchange. GENC uses ISO 3166 (Parts 1 and 2) names and code elements wherever possible, with modifications only where necessary to comply with US law and US Government recognition policy. This profile addresses unique US Government requirements for: restrictions in recognition of the national sovereignty of a country; identification and recognition of geopolitical entities not included in ISO 3166; and the use of names of countries and country subdivisions that have been approved by the US Board on Geographic Names. ISO 3166: Codes for the Representation of Names of Countries (ISO 3166) is prepared by the International Organization for Standardization. ISO 3166 includes two- and three-character alphabetic codes and three-digit numeric codes that may be needed for activities involving exchange of data with international organizations that have adopted that standard. Except for the numeric codes, ISO 3166 codes have been adopted in the US as FIPS 104-1: American National Standard Codes for the Representation of Names of Countries, Dependencies, and Areas of Special Sovereignty for Information Interchange.STANAG 1059: Letter Codes for Geographical Entities (8th edition, 2004) is a Standardization Agreement (STANAG) established and maintained by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO/OTAN) for the purpose of providing a common set of geo-spatial identifiers for countries, territories, and possessions. The 8th edition established trigraph codes for each country based upon the ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 character sets. These codes are used throughout NATO.Internet: The Internet country code is the two-letter digraph maintained by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in the ISO 3166 Alpha-2 list and used by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to establish country-coded top-level domains (ccTLDs).