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Comment by lolinder

7 months ago

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

41 comments

lolinder

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margalabargala  7 months ago

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.

not2b  7 months ago

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.

the_mitsuhiko  7 months ago

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.

  • lolinder  7 months ago

    > 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.

  • roryirvine  7 months ago

    .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.

  • mywittyname  7 months ago

    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?

    • lolinder  7 months ago

      Two character TLDs are reserved for country codes, and they're meant to reflect a very specific ISO-standardized list of country codes:

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

      Breaking with ISO 3166-1 comes with the risk that a new ISO-standardized country cannot claim its TLD.

      So in order to reclaim the TLD as generic, startups dont just have to persuade ICANN, they have to make the case to ISO that IO is a significant enough code that it should be an "exceptional reservation" like UK, UN, EU, and SU.

    • saaaaaam  7 months ago

      .pizza is a gTLD (generic top level domain) rather than a ccTLD (country code top level domain). ICANN rules say that gTLDs have to have three characters or more. So you can have .xyz but not .xo

dogma1138  7 months ago

It doesn’t matter really what ICANN decides if the registrars ignore it.

  • crote  7 months ago

    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.

magicalhippo  7 months ago

Perhaps naive question: why can't they simply convert it from a ccTLD to a gTLD?

  • lolinder  7 months ago

    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.