Comment by amiga386
6 months ago
Nothing, because .io was operated by some wheeler-dealer without the authority of the UK. Apparently he just dumped money into the bank accounts of the various overseas territories he was selling the domain names for and they were OK with it?
He's since sold it on and now a hedge fund owns it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io
Officially, the British Indian Ocean Territories will cease to exist, therefore so would the ISO 2-letter country code. However, ccTLDs have outlasted countries before, notably ".su" for the no longer existing USSR. I suspect that IANA would prioritise not breaking millions of domain names over trying to police ccTLDs.
Google's view on the matter is that .io is already effectively a gTLD rather than a ccTLD, like with .nu, .to, .tv, as most of the registrants run websites with a global audience or at least an audience other than the island nations whose ccTLDs they are.
As far as I can find .su is the exception in surviving, not the rule, and who operated the ccTLD is irrelevant to the question of whether ICANN decides to allow it to live on.
It does seem likely that ICANN won't kill off all existing registrations, but this is supposition, not an answer. If we look only at what they've done historically to ccTLDs the most likely outcome is that new registrations become locked and ICANN attempts to phase the .io TLD out.
They may break that trend now given how much they've already polluted the TLD space, but they may not, and I think your comment is a bit too optimistic. People with .io domains should absolutely be paying close attention here.
Edit: gnfargbl found the actual written policy [0].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41730559
I can't be the only person who read this and was curious about what other ccTLDs have existed and have since been removed, so here's the list of them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain#...
There was also a .um for US minor outlying islands, removed in 2008.
That list doesn't seems complete, ".an" at least isn't in there [1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.an
1 reply →
They might just change its status to a vanity top level domain like ".lol" or ".sucks" and sell it to the highest bidder, taking the money. They would justify it by saying that they want to promote stability, maybe require that the new owner honor the domains at least until they expire and then charge what they want. That seems to be the way ICANN works these days.
That's not entirely true. .su is an exceptional reservation but it's not the only one with a tld. For instance ".uk" exists and ".ac" exists.
It's absolutely possible that someone will asking for an exceptional reservation for IO at ISO and it can be kept alive forever.
> It's absolutely possible that someone will asking for an exceptional reservation for IO at ISO and it can be kept alive forever.
I agree it's possible, I disagree with OP that it's a foregone conclusion.
At this point if I were the owner of a .io domain I would treat that as the unlikely best case scenario and start looking at what domain I'd fall back to if ICANN sticks to their rules.
.uk only exists because UKERNA was already using it (or, rather, UK.) for JANET's own X500-ish system that pre-dates the standardisation of DNS.
At one point, it was intended that moving the UK's internet resources to .gb would be the final stage of the transition from the internal JANET system.
By the time I first heard about that in the early 90s, that had already gained legendary "that'll never happen" status - and, sure enough, the transition was declared complete when the last UK.AC.SITE <-> ac.uk mail gateways were retired circa 1996.
11 replies →
I mean, the TLD .pizza exists, so could .io move to the same mechanism that allows those to exist? Or is it something like 2-3 character TLDs are reserved for country codes?
3 replies →
It doesn’t matter really what ICANN decides if the registrars ignore it.
And it doesn't matter what the registrars choose to do when the entire ".io" TLD gets kicked out of the root name servers - who in turn are following the official zone file as published by ICANN.
Accepting registrations for a domain is pretty useless when those domains aren't going to resolve to anything.
4 replies →
Perhaps naive question: why can't they simply convert it from a ccTLD to a gTLD?
Two-letter domains are defined to be ccTLDs—if it's two letters, it's a country code domain. Breaking that rule would risk leaving a future ISO-standardized country unable to claim its domain because its code was already assigned to a tech startup gTLD.
10 replies →
> Officially, the British Indian Ocean Territories will cease to exist, therefore so would the ISO 2-letter country code.
Many territories have TLDs even if they're just a region of another country, like .tf and .re in the Indian Ocean which are on France. So there's no reason .io could not just continue without change (other than NIC ownership) now that it's part of Mauritius.
A hedge fund operates the .io domain, they don't AFAIK own it without restriction. As a ccTLD, what happens if Mauritius tells ICANN "nope, not theirs, ours now, it's an asset as part of the transfer of sovereignty". In fact, in the link you provide, it looks like people involved have already starting a repatriation effort.
Of course, in the end, it'll probably end up with no end-user impact because someone (the existing operator or a new one) will negotiate a deal ($$$) with Mauritius that will provide continuity of operations and (hopefully) be more beneficial to the people of Chagos.
Mauritius already has an ISO 3166 code "MU" and matching ccTLD ".mu". "IO" isn't going to be a standard code. Its far from a foregone conclusion that ".io" will exist 10 years from now.
Yes, you are of course right...10 years + (however many years the legal process of transferring sovereignty takes) + (some number of extra years because stuff happens) from now I would completely agree it probably won't be around. But from an internet perspective for a mostly fad driven TLD I personally would expect on the day .io finally disappears from the nameservers the reaction will be "oh...that was still around?" or worse case a tiny number of "I forgot we registered that".
Tl;dr: "someone will likely run .io until ICANN turns it off, which it probably will, but we don't know who that is right now".
As someone with an io domain, I really appreciate this post. I've had general fears that political decisions would be made that would make trouble for me on top of the standard business decisions to take as much as they can from me.
Now it seems likely I will only have to worry about the hedge funds!
As fun as the .io TLD is, its entire sordid history is a shitshow.
It's a novelty TLD, and anyone who used it expecting stability should have looked for a different flag of convenience.
Won't the hedge fund have to acquiesce to the ICANN if it demands that .Io be shut down? Afaik, ICANN only allows two letter domains for countries.
Alternatively ICANN might (should imo) transfer the TLD registrar to Mauritius.
It doesn't really track that the original creation of .io being sordid means a political change won't have implications, (possibly even) modelled on and/or justified by the questionable history..
[flagged]
Oh be quiet. That’s a ludicrously uncharitable interpretation of what they were saying, all in service of you…getting to be…snarky?
I knew what I was getting into and the risks involved.
> by some wheeler-dealer without the authority of the UK.
Doesn't seem like a random wheeler dealer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kane_(entrepreneur)
> from 2010 to 2017 was one of seven people entrusted with a credit card-like key to restart portions of the World Wide Web or internet which are secured with DNSSEC,
It's a ccTLD not controlled by the country it's for. Paul Kane was a personal friend of Jon Postel, and Postel simply gave him authority to run .io, .ac, and .sh, which he did privately for his own benefit.
He also claimed he paid these countries... somehow... and yet the UK government said he didn't. A shady wheeler-dealer with exceptionally good connections to the people that ran DNS before IANA/ICANN existed.
https://fortune.com/2020/08/31/crypto-fraud-io-domain-chagos...
> The terms of the agreement remain secret, but in 2014 Kane told me that a portion of the .io proceeds went to the British government, to be deposited into an account for the administration of the Chagos Islands. Responding to a subsequent parliamentary question that year from Lord Avebury, a liberal civil rights advocate, the government said that it had no such plans, because it received no revenues from ICB.
> Kane did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this article. The U.K.’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office declined to comment on the Chagossians’ claim to the domain extension and again denied that the British government receives any .io proceeds.
I still miss .oz.
This one needs to come back. It's been over twenty years, any legacy services that are calling out to .oz instead of .au are probably in need of a good crash these days anyway.
> I suspect that IANA would prioritise not breaking millions of domain names over trying to police ccTLDs.
I'm surprised this wouldn't be the default behavior for existing owners? Kinda making me re-think buying an IO domain for my personal stuff. Are gTLDs the safest option?
You should always be aware of political risks when buying a ccTLD. There's precedent that these have caused serious issues for domain holders, one notable example
https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/12/24071036/queer-af-mastodo...
Outages and poor management are one possibility. Other is the fact that you have to trust the country running the ccTLD with DNSSEC keys. This might rule out things like using TLSA/DANE or SSHFP records.
2 replies →
The gTLDs are also subject to the whims of a foreign country (usually the USA). The safest option is probably your own country's ccTLD, since any dispute would go solely through your own country's laws and courts (to which you're already subjected, by virtue of living there).
Unfortunately, the .us TLD prevents hiding whois, even partially. So registering a domain under that TLD is just asking for perpetual spam.
2 replies →
I have some insight into this domain (pun duly intended), I work for a foundation managing two ccTLDs. Once the ccTLD has been delegated to an entity it is very hard to get that back without the consent of all parties. Meaning unless the entity that now holds the delegation to manage the ccTLD agrees to sell it or give it back they generally won't lose it.
That's a reassuring response from a reassuring username.
.su survives only because Russian users kicked up a massive stink about keeping it. About 20 years ago, ICANN was quite determined to kill it off.
[flagged]
How does using these TLDs exploit "3rd world people"?
I don't think it does directly, but I suppose in a macro sense, by paying for a .io domain you're contributing to the system responsible for the exploitation of these people.
An analogy: a bunch of indigenous people are kicked off their island, and coffee is grown there by the people who evicted them. You buy the coffee, and the people who have the rightful claim to the land don't receive any of the profits.
To add insult to injury, the coffee is named after the island it's grown on, and that's mostly why it's popular - because it's a really good name for coffee (maybe it's called Java Island).
That's basically what the .io domain is.
The .io/.sh/.ac TLDs were effectively invented and run by a British guy; he states some of the resulting profits were shared back with the UK government, which controls those territories, to benefit the inhabitants of such territories; the UK government denies this ever happened. The reality is likely that those people were effectively stripped of their rightful "internet property", in a way not dissimilar from old colonial exploitation.
To be honest, if .io is not handed back to the Chagossian, it would be better to shut it down and turn the page on a pretty shameful page of internet history.
TLDs are a PONZI SCHEME and it should be ILLEGAL