Comment by paxys
6 months ago
Do people really think ICANN will make a large number of popular startups/websites/apps unusable overnight based on a technicality? That's not how the world works. .io has a globally recognized registrar and they will continue doing business as they do today.
I don't think they'd do it overnight, but I can absolutely see them locking future registrations and setting an expiration date.
They might get enough complaints that they have to keep extending that date indefinitely. And they might not choose to do it at all in this case. But they've been very clear over the years what ccTLDs are supposed to be for, and their first instinct will be to preserve the integrity of the naming system as designed, not to preserve startups who bet on them ignoring their own rules.
If they do move forward with this, I think going forward companies will be much more cautious before getting a vanity domain.
Lots of people lost their domains when .tk (and the many other free domains) died and got reborn.
There's a list of ccTLDs that died. .yu expired in 2010. .zr moved mostly to .cd in 2001.
Perhaps .io will not disappear immediately, but it can definitely fall under new management, possibly with double or triple the already high fees for good measure, or registrations will be restricted to the people of Mauritius.
A TLD will not keep existing just because people use it, especially a TLD belonging to a specific government such as .io or .ai.
I lost a bunch of .tk I was paying for. They were one of the few that supported emoji domains.
Do people really think ICANN will make a large number of popular startups/websites/apps unusable overnight based on a technicality? That's not how the world works.
That's precisely how the world works. When you build your business on another business, these things happen. And especially on the internet.
Anyone who's been on the internet for more than a decade or so will have seen that random business-changing tectonic shifts happen all the time.
If you've always grown up in the current era of "stable" and ubiquitous internet, it may seem like it's always been there and always will be. It hasn't. It won't.
Whether the registrar keeps doing business is irrelevant if the root nameservers stop serving NS for .io.
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It could well morph into "MIOT", maintaining the CC for the benefit of Mauritian citizens. After all, western interests have already extracted benefits from their land for decades, it would be only just that they get to keep some of those benefits forever. Indians didn't demolish all buildings and railroads built for British benefit, they just repurposed for their own; the same should probably happen here.
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Feel free to point out anything I got wrong.