After the Scottish independence campaign failed to achieve more than 50% of the vote in the 2014 referendum, the message from "No" voters was clear: the main problem with independence was a lack of a 2-letter ISO 3166 country code suitable for Scotland. The knock-on effect of this is that there would be no suitable country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) in the case of an independent Scotland. And while .scot has been a popular choice since its introduction in 2014 (including the Scottish Government with gov.scot), it is actually a gTLD controlled by a not-for-profit, rather than a ccTLD controlled by the government. The most obvious candidates, SC and SL, are taken by Seychelles and Sierra Leone but every other conceivable option is also unavailable, with SO, ST, SA, SN and SD already assigned to other countries.
With unofficial independence polls still struggling to reflect a consistent and statistically significant majority for a future "Yes" vote, the First Minister of Scotland and Scottish National Party (SNP) leader, John Swinney, announced they had no choice but to perform a hostile takeover of a country with a suitable code. So at Hollyrood yesterday, a full-scale invasion of the African country, Seychelles, was declared to the Scottish parliament in order to secure the SC country code and .sc ccTLD.
What the SNP were keen to describe as a "special military operation" was launched in the early hours of yesterday morning as ships and aircrafts made their way to the archipelago off the east coast of Africa's mainland. Although there was some suggestion that maintaining control of the 115 islands going forward could allow exciting tourism opportunities for Scotland, they have confirmed that once Seychelles cedes control of SC, there is currently no appetite to occupy the islands. With SY, SE and SS all also unavailable it remains to be seen if Seychelles will accept a country code made up of unrelated letters or if it will decide to take military action against Syria, Sweden or South Sudan.