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.

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.

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.

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

[dupe]

News from last week.

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729526

More recently Related:

The Disappearance of an Internet Domain

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41778633

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

Sounds like fun. Y2IO.