Comment by randompeach

7 months ago

Let’s start my comment new /o\

My guess is that noting will happen for now. It’s mostly a decision that ICANN working groups have to figure out. But given the current size of the .io zone and that we already have a non existing cctld (.su for Soviet Unite), I’m pretty confident it will exist in the mid-term future.

19 comments

randompeach

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rafram  7 months ago

.su is administered by the Russian national registry, because Russia is de facto the Soviet Union’s successor state. In this case, though, would .io stay with the UK or come under Mauritian control? It’s not clear.

  • andyjohnson0  7 months ago

    Like the other remnants of the British Empire, the British Indian Ocean Territory was never a part of the UK. It was just land that we (the UK) expropriated from Mauritius at independence. A just solution would be for Mauritius, as the (now) actual successor state, to control dot-io.

    IMO what will probably happen is that ICANN "promotes" the zone to being yet another top-level non-country code domain like .biz or .horse etc. Which is effectively what it is now.

    Edit to add:

    I don't think the .su precedent is applicable here. The Soviet Union was an internationally recognised state with a population, military, Montevideo Convention duties, seat at the UN, etc. The BIOT was and is nothing like that.

    • chippiewill  7 months ago

      Turning dot-io into a gTLD is certainly seems like the best course of action, but I think it's far from likely that ICANN will do that considering that there are no other two-letter gTLDs.

      8 replies →

  • the_mitsuhiko  7 months ago

    > In this case, though, would .io stay with the UK or come under Mauritian control? It’s not clear.

    Before the retirement of .yu, Slovenia wanted to hold on to it, but it was not the successor state of Yugoslavia so they had to relinquish control and pass it to Serbia. So going by that logic, it would not stay in the UK (for long).

    • zarzavat  7 months ago

      British Indian Ocean Territory isn’t a state, it’s just a territory with a military base on it, so there is no successor state.

      It’s like if Guantanamo Bay had its own ccTLD.

      The land will go to Mauritius, the legal entity of British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist (presumably).

      2 replies →

dmurray  7 months ago

ccTLDs other than .su have been retired when the country they represented ceased to exist or got renamed. .zr, .tp, .cs (twice?) according to [0]

I agree with you though, there doesn't seem to be a strong rule for this kind of thing and all interested parties would likely prefer for .io to continue to exist, so it will continue to exist, probably under Mauritius's ownership.

[0] https://snapshot.internetx.com/en/these-tlds-do-not-exist-an...