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Considering my instance has .io domain, I hope not
RIP itch.io
Nooo, what will become of my beloved fedia.io?
Jesus Christ this will be a major pain in the ass if it goes through… I’m really not in the mood of having to reconfigure all my self hosted services to a new domain.
Do it anyway. Having anything behind a TLD that is tied to the political control of a tiny geographic area is insanely careless
Maybe, but I had no idea this was tied to a country. I thought it was a novelty tld, like xyz and art. You know, like input/output so io.
All two letter domains are country-code domains.
That assumption is exactly why tons of techbros jumped on it. But no, it’s for the British Indian Ocean Territory. Roughly 23 square miles of islands all within pissing distance of each other south of India.
Yeah, I’ve been with you. I owned a couple .so from Somalia for a while. They cranked up the cost to $$$ and I had to cancel it. I’m not a smartass, I just burned myself already in the past
TLDR: no
Interesting to see how no one bothered to read the article.
Real TL;DR: Maybe.
History tells us YES. Money tells us NO.
I did read the article. The answer is inconclusive not an definitive no.
According to all the rules it should stop existing, taking common sense into account it’ll carry on. Thing is it remains to be seen where the common sense will be taken into account. Common sense isn’t all that common.
The article said companies profit from it, so their prediction is no. It’s just an opinion, and not supported by any legal or diplomatic action in the article.
My opinion is it should cease to exist. Two letter domains are country codes and IANA policy is it should match a list maintained by the UN. IANA has no business deciding for itself and has said it doesn’t want to, and they’re opening themselves to all sorts of liability and complications should they stray from that. If the UN no longer says its a valid country, it needs to no longer be a country code domain, and that’s too bad for any companies speculating on its future
I’m surprised it’s not mentioned in the article, but also complicating this situation is the Chagos refugees seeking to take control of the TLD and/or receive reparations from the current registrar.
Good.
One of our spinoff companies wants to act so badly like a start up and be edgy they moved everything to a .io domain. This would be icing on the cake for how cowboy they manage everything.
while funny, it would cause me so many headaches either directly or indirectly that is completely cancels out
It would cause me a large number of professional headaches but I still think it’ll be funnier than that.
My company didn’t jump on the
.iobandwagon, so it would just be a bunch of random dead links.So for me, it should be net funny.
I’m pretty sure our site uses a CDN that is
.ioso that going to be interesting.
No.
Why would Mauritius turn down a source of revenue?
Because .io is the top level country code domain for the British Indian Ocean Territory, and once a country ceases to exist, the top level domain is supposed to be phased out according to the IANA rules and eventually discontinued by the ICANN.
There are no .yu, .dd, .cs, or .tp domains left. The only exception I know is .su (soviet union).For anyone who is not familiar, your day would surely be improved by watching the Map Men video on this topic.
“They have to get rid of it unless they decide not to.”
I assume it’s just gonna be inherited by Mauritius.
There’s plenty of non country domains too. Just make it into some acronym or have it mean I/O or whatever.
IIRC two letter domains are reserved for country specific domains, the non-country domains start with three letters.
There are sure, but none are two letters because those are restricted to country codes. Specifically the ISO 3166-1 alpha 2
Then it’s going to be an autonomous territory (like e.g. the Faroer) called the Mauritian Indian Ocean Territory. Countries don’t need to be sovereign to exist and have ISO codes. If Mauritius wants to they can do it even if the IANA insists on the letter of their rules.
Well they better make another damn exception.
The only reason .su still exists is because Russia said they would decommission it and then never did. ICANN chose not to let that happen again, which explains their choice to decommission the later ones.
What the fuck is the point of decommissioning them entirely, though? What value does that do anybody? Is there another country waiting in the wings? There are 1500 TLD’s already.
The obvious non-dickhead solution would be to transition the mgmt of
.iofrom a ccTLD to a gTLD. “Rules” is not an answer.Yeah, the whole concept of “national” TLDs is proving to be a rather poor one in practice. Very few of them actually make sense in the way they’re used.
That sounds more like an issue of enforcement than anything. If anyone can register a domain with your country’s extension, it’s not really your country’s extension.
If we handled it properly, those domains would have value.
Yes, but when management fails the impact should not be imposed on the subordinates for following the process; it should be entirely on management.
In practice, this would mean creating a more stringent DNS approach to ccTLD’s that does not impact existing domains until if/when they choose to adopt it. Ultimately it just shows ICANN’s inadequacy &/or incompetence, which I guarantee has more to do with it’s management than it’s engineers/workers.
ccTLDs are pointless anyway. They always end up getting used in unexpected ways and it always causes problems. It doesn’t do anyone any real benefit having them exist anyway. For example the US doesn’t even use theirs.
The sensible thing to do would be to stop worrying about it and just let it carry on existing.
Even Google uses a ccTLD for that link shortener for YouTube.
Still, too much money on
.ioto be shutdown..iois just too big to fail.Well, they should have chosen a gTld
So they could just transform .io to a gTLD without causing any downtime.
EDIT: Apparently not that easy :(
2.12 Can a New gTLD name be 2 letters?
Applied-for gTLD strings in ASCII must be composed of three or more visually distinct characters. Two-character ASCII strings are not permitted, to avoid conflicting with current and future country-codes based on the ISO 3166-1 standard.
Either way a policy change is needed.
luckily those are their internal rules and now international laws that can’t be broken.
THere’s literally 0 reason they can’t just go “well, this tld is too big. it’s generic now”
The profits gained from sales of .io domains has come under increasing scrutiny given that the UK’s control over the archipelago itself is under threat.
Chagossian refugee groups (former inhabitants forcibly removed in the 1960s and 1970s) petitioning the UK government for the right of return have recently extended their grievances to the return of the .io domain as well (Chagos Refugees Group United Kingdom et al. vs. Internet Computer Bureau Limited Citation 2021).
Additionally, Mauritius is also attempting to gain control over .io by petitioning IANA for redelegation (Bowcott Citation 2022).
However, while these groups fight for control over the .io domain, a recent UN ruling challenging British sovereignty over the island threatens the existence of the ccTLD itself.https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23738871.2023.2238723
While I agree with you in that ICANN will probably save .io through some policy change it isn’t as easy as just saying “screw all our policies, this ccTLD is now a gTLD.” considering the fighting going on regarding it.
international laws that can’t be broken.
You sweet summer child…
Maybe. But it’s up to ICANN and their rules, money might not be relevant to them, and with .io, there literally isn’t a single person or company that uses it “correctly” as country TLDs are primarily intended to be used by entities connected to that country, and the territory has no permanent residents, unlike with .su.
On the flip side, that might work for the case too as well - maybe ICANN decides to make it a generic TLD, like .com or .org instead as it’s not really directly connected to a country?
We shall see.money might not be relevant to them
Hilarious.
Why would how much money Mauritius might or might not make be any relevance to ICANN, a US non-profit?
Because money means influence. Whether it’s the nation to benefit or the myriad of US tech companies that want it to stay, or other international interests, it’s way too much potential influence and I suspect cannot be ignored for some strict adherence to rules that no one really would care to defend.
as country TLDs are primarily intended to be used by entities connected to that country
Primarily, sure, but quite a few of them get abused, check the notes column. A glaring one these days is
.ai, as areyoutu.beand, of course,goatse.cx.Tuvalu make around $10 million a year- about one-sixth of their gdp- from licensing
.tv.
RIP my @tuta.io email address lmao
Yes, there is laws, IANA says that ideally in 3-5 years all the .io will be gone, like the .yu ones, they do not exist anymore.
I doubt it. The cited precedent of .yu didn’t have a ton of big international commercial interest, but .io does.
They will absolutely find a rationale to change what io means when ISO retires io. The “laws” will be tweaked, ignored, or loopholed around.
They’re not laws anyway. They are just things that ICANN say. It’s very easy to change the rules it’s not like they have to be consulted on or anything
The .su domain is still active and the Soviet Union does not exist for more than 30 years now.
yes because at the time they didn’t know what to do, and gave .su to the .ru guys. For .yu it was also a little bit messy with multiple new countries wanting to control it. This is when IANA made laws to properly handle end of ccTLD like this, .yu does not exist anymore, it will be the same for .io
fight for chagossian self-rule so that we can keep having .io addresses
Why not just let people have whatever suffix they want?
They do, that’s why this is an issue in the first place. The purpose of ccTLDs is to host domains associated with a particular country. If the country stops existing, there’s no reason to use that country’s ccTLD. The problem is they let anyone register domains under this ccTLD even if they have no association with that country, hence the situation we’re in.
Actually I believe you had to be a British national to register. Well at least you’re supposed to be a British national I’m not sure how much they checked.
Zero checking. Anyone can register a .io. You can go register one right now in 5 minutes if you wanted.
Some amount of organization is a good thing for many reasons. Think of an analogy to roads where basic traffic rules allow everyone the freedom to travel wherever and however but subject to the rules of locales. Feel free to pick your own domain within any generally recognized top level domain, according to the rules established by that tld.
In particular, two character top level domains are reserved for ownership by specific countries. They get to say who can have a presence there, under what standards, and they deserve any profit made from that. This was a way of giving everyone a voice, to expand it beyond the us, to give many interests their own home
