Scotland's plan to invade Seychelles and seize control of the .sc domain failed spectacularly when the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) confirmed that even if the African country's administration could be convinced to give up the ISO 3166 2-letter code, it would not be reassigned to another country. Convinced that the lack of a suitable ccTLD is the main issue preventing Scots from voting for independence, the country has now developed a non-military solution to the problem. With SC, SL, SO, ST, SA, SN and SD already assigned, the plan is to make use of the available code SQ - while this means a small amendment to the country's name, it at least does not require the invasion of any other sovereign states.
Although there was strong consideration given to AB, owing to Alba being the Scottish Gaelic word for Scotland, it was determined that rebranding to Sqotland would give a spelling and phonetic claim to SQ and there was a strong impression that the letter Q is quite cool. Crucially the pronunciation of Sqotland remains the same as Scotland despite some fears that the name Squotland (along with associated pronunciation "Squatland" and undesirable connotations) would be adopted due to the prevalence of the "qu" digraph in the English language.
The good news of Sqotland finally securing not only its own ccTLD but potentially independence from the UK does bring with it certain problems and question marks. Since its introduction in 2014, the geoTLD .scot has seen over 13k registrations but now appears to have been rendered somewhat obsolete by the imminent arrival of the .sq domain. If the not-for-profit is selected as the registry operator for the new ccTLD, they could choose to grant all second-level .scot domain holders the equivalent .sq domain before phasing out the geoTLD. They would probably need to rebrand their own organisation name as well and in approximately fourteen years' time they could decide whether to apply for .sqot in the next round of ICANN's new gTLD program.