Future of .io domains uncertain as UK hands over Chagos islands

33 pointsposted 9 months ago
by apitman
(domainincite.com)

23 Comments

jsheard

9 months ago

People keep having to learn this the hard way, before committing to a TLD take stock of who actually operates it. You don't want to be the guy who bought an .af domain because it sounds like "as fuck" and only find out later that the Taliban gets to decide whether you can keep using it.

jchw

9 months ago

That actually isn't really the point here, the point here is that ccTLDs are reserved (mostly) for ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes and one of them is about to cease to exist. Not to say .io hasn't been a mess, but it's kind of irrelevant.

mnau

9 months ago

What's your point? .io is operated by a Internet Computer Bureau, that is owned by Identity Digital. Identity Digital manages (sponsors/owns) ~30% of TLDs.

> Identity Digital / Donuts is either the ICANN-approved sponsor organization or owns controlling interest in the ICANN-approved sponsor organization for 264 top-level domains,[12] approximately 30% of all generally-available TLDs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Digital

jsheard

9 months ago

My point is that .io represented a state which officially has zero permanent residents, which probably shouldn't have inspired confidence in its continued existence. Yes the paperwork was outsourced to Donuts in this case, but the principle of doing your due diligence on a TLD still applies.

mnau

9 months ago

Moot point.

I was born in Czechoslovakia (.cs). It had whooping few thousands registered names (the biggest of decommissioned TLDs). It was later discontinued and we have .cz and .sk instead. .cs was reborn for Serbia and Montenegro and decommissioned again.

Here is the moral: any domain can go away. We had millions of permanent residents and yet it went away.

echelon

9 months ago

Easy fix: the ccTLD is now a gTLD.

apitman

9 months ago

I'm pretty sure all 2-character TLDs are reserved for country codes.

user

9 months ago

[deleted]

riffic

9 months ago

the thing is if you point this out people just treat you like a debbie downer

mnau

9 months ago

Here is the key thing from the article:

> And ICANN typically doesn’t redelegate ccTLDs without the consent of the losing registry. [..] Niue, the Pacific island nation, has been fighting fruitlessly for control of .nu for two decades, for example, but the extant registry doesn’t want to hand it over so ICANN has not acted.

ICANN does have rules for decommissioning old domain, but it's a very remote chance anything will happen and even then - there would be a decade long transition period.

tremarley

9 months ago

The .io domain was originally run by a guy who didn’t really have the UK’s official backing. He was basically just depositing money into the accounts of different overseas territories for the domains he was selling, and they seemed to be fine with it. Eventually, he sold it off, and now a hedge fund owns it.

The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) will eventually stop existing, which means its ISO country code would go away too. But domain names tied to countries have outlasted countries before—like .su from the old USSR. IANA would likely prioritize keeping all the existing .io domains working over worrying about whether the country behind it still exists.

Google already treats .io more like a generic top-level domain (gTLD), similar to .nu, .to, or .tv, since most of the sites using it have a global audience, not just people from the small island it’s technically tied to.

pestatije

9 months ago

The island of Diego Garcia is excluded from the deal, so it might still stay as BIOT

bananapub

9 months ago

this worry is so very stupid. the .su domain is still around and still serving despite the empire it was created for ending over 30 years ago. ICANN isn't some automaton that has to follow whatever silly rules they have written down, they'll just change the rules or whatever - if it is actually needed - to keep .io exactly as it is.

apple4ever

9 months ago

Agreed. No reason they can't just keep it around.

delduca

9 months ago

I trust only .com and .org to register my domains for serious and long-term projects.

delduca

9 months ago

Besides being cheaper.

tannhaeuser

9 months ago

.io is so 2010ish anyway. .ai is where it's at right now, for a price.

jsheard

9 months ago

The .ai TLD also technically belongs to an obscure British overseas territory much like .io did.

Keir Starmer has the opportunity to do the funniest thing right now.

cyberax

9 months ago

Hm. Should I move all my domains to .af or .so? Both are so good!

HatchedLake721

9 months ago

Let’s start a petition to rename .io to input output.

user

9 months ago

[deleted]