This is about .io being a country code and that country ceasing to exist, so .io will be retired. I say who the fuck cares, release the kracken .io.
The fact that an insane number of sites use it makes it a big deal. If it dies, there will be plenty of dead links
By “release the kracken .io” I’m saying make it open for general use that is not country specific. We already have tons of domains, I see no reason why this has to be retired.
It’s strange to me that they wouldn’t simply reassign control of it to another… erm, what’s the word?, at least for the technology-related domains.
I was wondering the same. It’s a very popular TLD, so you’d think they would grandfather it in as a generic (non-country) TLD like .net or whatever.
Country code domains are decided by international agreement on two character abbreviations per country, and IANA needs to abide by that.
For example, can you imagine IANA caught In the middle of whether ‘.cn’ should be owned by China or Taiwan? What a disaster that would be. Their only sustainable approach is to stay out of it, and just follow what the UN says
I generally agree, but .io stands for “indian ocean”, which isn’t a country.
at least for the technology-related domains.
It’s not a technology related domain though; it’s a country’s domain that happens to be used for a lot of tech.
With the country dissolving, the domain does too, so it can become available for future countries.
Wouldn’t the country and domain dissolving mean it can be reassigned? I don’t understand why after that it would still be considered a country TLD only available for future countries.
Because 2 letter tlds are reserved to be issued to countries. Ideally the country’s 2 letter country code.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain
All ASCII ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all two-letter top-level domains are ccTLDs.
An important piece of history missing from this article is that back when IANA was formalized, they realized they couldn’t be the ones to arbitrate country level domains. There was already an international organization formalizing two character codes for country names, so they basically said that would be the decider.
In the same way, it’s not up to them whether to recognize a country’s existence, they rely on that international agreement and they need to abide by that
In a way, I understand, .yu was removed years ago for instance. Here it is because .io is pretty special for geek and all
So the .su domain was handed to Russia to operate alongside its own (.ru). The Russian government agreed that it would eventually be shut down, but no clear rules around its governance or when that should happen were defined.
But ambiguity is the worst thing for a top-level domain. Unknowingly, this decision created an environment in which .su became a digital wild west. Today, it is a barely policed top-level domain, a plausibly deniable home for Russian dark ops and a place where supremacist content and cyber-crime have found cover.
I seems IANA would like to not repeat past mistakes.
at the same time they’re allowing any tld to who’s willing to fork $100k per year. So just sell the management of the tld
I doubt this will happen, but they should just reassign it to the Mauritius authority. The citizens of the islands could then potentially see some benefit from it, not Google or ICANN or whoever selflessly offers to take it over.
Normally that would have been the preferred solution, but since IANA has experienced all kinds of shenanigans on similar occasions they have decided to not allow ccTLD’s to survive their former country anymore.
Yep. And for very good reasons, as explained in the article. But knowing that domains can be a significant source of income for a small nation, it does seem a shame to both waste that resource and break tons of sites in the process. I wish there were better ways to do this that didn’t mean shutting it down or even selling it off to the highest bidder (who already has enough money).
