Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the Chagos Islands?
UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98ynejg4l5o
UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98ynejg4l5o
Related ongoing thread:
UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729325 - Oct 2024 (33 comments)
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
That section doesn't attempt to maintain a full list.
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.
There are non GB UK countries though, or at least one in NI.
Right, but confusingly, GB is the ISO 2 code for the United Kingdom, even though the United Kingdom is much bigger than Great Britain, where the GB abbreviation comes from.
Pet hate: Regularly running into dropdowns that list countries by name, but sort them by country code.
Thanks for explaining where that apparently random ordering comes from - drives me nuts too!
At least for the identification sticker / stripe on cars we've moved from GB to UK. Maybe we'll just move to uk as the ISO 2 letter code.
IVR codes are not ISO 3166-1 codes. The ISO codes are all two letters; the IVR codes range from one to three letters.
Makes sense, also in keeping with the excessively complicated naming that thousands of years of dispute produces.
.im
The Isle of Man isn't part of the UK, but rather a Crown Dependency, as are Jersey (.je) and Guernsey (.gg): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Dependencies
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?
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.
Two-character TLDs are reserved for country codes, yes.
.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
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.
But do the root name servers _have_ to respect the ICANN zone file?
at least one of the root name servers is hosted by ICANN, so there's essentially zero chance that all of the roots will choose to disrgard the ICANN zone file.
If an ICANN decision would be seen as detrimental to the smooth operation of the global DNS network yes there is, their server would simply be quarantined yes it would be a problem since root servers are “hardcoded” in many places but for the most part all the major DNS services can continue to operate without them for a while at least.
A bunch of startups losing out on domains they bought despite best practices is not an event I would call “detrimental to the smooth operation of the global DNS network”.
This was a known and willfully ignored business risk for these places.
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.
Would a future ISO-standardized country get assigned a code that collides with an historical code?
The short-lived country of Serbia and Montenegro got assigned .cs (from Crna Gora - Srbija) which previously belonged to Czechoslovakia, but it seems it was never used (they kept using .yu).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.cs
Reusing country codes seems like it would annoy a lot of DBAs, not just people involved with the domain name system.
I've heard it discussed as a possibility tho I don't personally know how the ISO CC assignment process works. On the other hand, we don't exactly create new countries at a rate that exhausting 26^2 combinations should be an issue, but I suppose that could change.
There are only 334 unassigned and unreserved <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2#Decoding_ta...>. That’s honestly not that many. More to the point, there’s a distinct preference for names meaning something. Sometimes you can’t get exactly what you want: for example, Australia and Austria both start with AU, and only one of them could get AU. I dunno how Austria got AT, but was it “Australia gets AU, AS makes more sense for American Samoa, AR makes more sense for Argentina… guess AT is the best we can give them”?
Jump a hundred years forwards to a hypothetical future where the USA is fragmenting, Iowa becomes a country, IA and IW are already assigned to some other countries that have sprung up, and ISO is somehow still relevant. When Iowa says “we want IO”, what do you say? “Sorry, we used that code a hundred years ago for a tiny island in the middle of nowhere, how do you feel about YA, it sounds a little like Iowa, right?”
(Admittedly if the USA fragmented, each state into a country, you’d have far worse problems than Iowa. Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana… eight Ms, and already M_ is down to only three available, MB, MI and MJ. M is a popular letter to start names with.)
There are already a few country codes assigned where I can’t see where the second letter came from, e.g. AW, AX, BJ, BQ, CW, GW, SX, PW. A definite habit of giving a W or X if they can’t come up with anything better.
A few country codes have already been reassigned once (having formerly been either assigned or reserved indefinitely, then deleted): AI, BQ, GE, LT, ME, RU, SK.
So what happens if the ISO decides to switch to three letter codes and screws a bunch of TLDs?
They could certainly say “we’re giving up on alpha-2 codes, new countries only get alpha-3 codes”. But it’d be rather difficult, as there’s a lot of software using alpha-2 codes. I imagine ISO and ICANN would talk, and maybe ISO 3166/MA would reserve any extant three-letter TLDs, so ICANN say “no new three-letter TLDs except for new countries”. That’d solve the issue entirely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-3
Fair enough. One could alleviate that concern by not opening gTLD for general two-letter registrations, reserving it for these special cases, but the core issue would remain.
They've done that a couple times (EU, UK, SU), but each of those was first reserved as an exception in the ISO standard. So that's probably where proponents of .io would need to start.
> 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.
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.
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..
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.
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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 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.
I think more relevantly than DNSSEC, couldn't they issue TLS certificates using DNS-01 validation? You have to trust your DNS registry.
They could, but WebPKI things get logged, doing split-horizon DNS for your victims doesn't.
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.
Which is weird! In contrast, .ca hides whois by default for personal registrations.
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.
That's a reassuring response from a reassuring username.
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".
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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
ICANN actually has a relevant written policy at https://www.iana.org/help/cctld-retirement.
The short answer is that -- if ICANN follows the policy -- then following the removal of IO from ISO-3166-2, the ccTLD has five years to initiate an orderly shutdown.
The ccTLD manager may request that this be extended to a maximum of ten years, but to do so they need to have reasons beyond a general desire to retain the existing ccTLD.
From the policy document:
"ccTLD eligibility is determined by the associated country or territory being assigned in the ISO 3166-1 standard."
So how does a country code get removed from the ISO 3166-1 list? A cursory web search wasn't very revealing.
That's a very good question. I don't know; does any other HN'er?
The most information I can find is that the standard is maintained by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency [1]. Additions appear to be mostly at the direction of the United Nations [2], but I couldn't find a clear procedure as to how a country code is removed. I'm also unclear on who makes the decision to mark codes as exceptionally reserved.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166#ISO_3166_Maintenance_...
[2] https://www.iso.org/iso-3166-country-codes.html
Perhaps the operative question is how did IO get into the ISO 3166 in the first place? My guess would be as part of the UK defensively creating the illusion of it being a legitimate territory.
It was in the original 1974 standard [1]. No real idea on the politics of the time, but Britain had "paid" Mauritius £3 million for the islands less than ten years before [2], and of course the US base on Diego Garcia was already established.
I use the scare quotes because Mauritius was a British colony at the time, and so the offer was quite possibly one that the Mauritians couldn't refuse. That, and the fact that £50m (in today's money) seems ridiculously cheap.
[1] https://cdn.standards.iteh.ai/samples/2448/e41694ad96e34e95b...
[2] https://www.biot.gov.io/about/history/
The ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency makes the changes to ISO 3166. They follow notifications from and include members from these other bodies:
https://www.iso.org/iso-3166-country-codes.htmlYou're right these agencies make changes... but they don't decide if a country gets a ccTLD or not. They take their cue from the UN's Country Names bulletin, which in turn requires the country to be member state of the UN, or a member of one of its agencies, or a party to the Statute of the International Court of Justice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1#Criteria_for_inclus...
Since the list was originally developed for post, there's precedent for far-flung regions of a country to have their own codes, even when they're not considered politically separate. French Guiana, for example, is considered fully part of France, and yet it has its own code (GF).
The Chagos Archipelago is a good distance from the rest of Mauritius, and so it may perhaps retain a separate registration on the ISO list.
ISO 3166-1 is maintained by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency which has members from agencies like ANSI, BSI, DIN, …. No way are they going to just let .io simply go out of existence. It's more like that Mauritius will attain ownership and then manage it similarly to other 'gTLDs'.
.co, .tv, and .me are ccTLDs not gTLDs. They're the ISO 3166 codes for those countries.
Some English-speaking people may treat them as global and not linked to countries, but they're not. The difference with .io is that BIOT was never a country and soon won't exist - whereas those countries have existed and will continue [1] to exist.
[1] quite possibly with the unfortunate exception of Tuvalu
That’s why I put gTLD in quotes.
> .co is owned by Columbia
aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombia
(not the NYC school, or the TV network)
Thank you for digging into this and getting an actual answer!
You're welcome. I think people here are often surprised that the internet registries actually spend time thinking about this stuff, and developing policy for it. But they do, and the results are easily accessible -- the link I provided was the top search engine hit for "icann cctld retirement policy".
Given ICANNs history they’ll probably want to do some “fact finding” in Mauritius, after which they’ll make a decision that most benefits their back pocket.
Does this mean that all .io domains will cease to exist?
I use a .io domain for some of my email. I’m starting to think I should divest and change my email everywhere instead of continuing to add more places to it. And worry about monitoring for a potential future shutdown.
Luckily, since I used a custom address for each place I used it (so I could track and block spam easily), I kept a spreadsheet of every site I used it with. 55 sites so far and I haven’t had to block anything for being sold, so it hasn’t really been that useful so far.
Same here.
Luckily, tho, I use alias from my mail provider, so I don't have to write them down.
Also, a password manager, so it won't be too much work changing my E-Mail Domain Name.
But it's still unfortunate. It's just a ccTLD what does it matter, let us keep it.
I have it setup in Proton where anything sent my domain goes to my inbox. So I write it down to keep track, just for my own knowledge of what I used (but it’s not technically needed). The nice thing is I don’t have to set anything up before I start to use it. I can just type sitename@mydomain.io and it shows up in my inbox, which has made it very low maintenance. I tried to setup aliases in the past and it became more work than I wanted.
The idea was if I got spam, I’d know who not to trust in the future, and could easily send anything to that address to spam/trash.
I use a password manager as well, and have all the accounts tagged in there as well. The spreadsheet was basically a backup, and for if I gave an email address out that wasn’t actually tied to an account I’d have a password for.
.su still exists, so there's precedent for keeping a "legacy" ccTLD of a non-existing entity.
ICANN's position is that their policy is triggered by changes to ISO-3166. The code SU has not been removed from ISO-3166-2; instead it is "exceptionally reserved" (as is the code UK).
If the standards committee takes the same approach with IO, then it's possible that gives ICANN a route not to apply this policy. However, if IO is deleted completely, then my reading is the policy would apply.
Great info!
Hope ICANN (a corrupt organization) doesn't "change its mind" about this at the last moment, due to some "lobbying" involved. We'll see!
By definition, any organization not composed entirely of elected representatives making completely transparent, documented decisions in perpetuity, 100 percent correctly is corrupt.
A sword of damacles hanging over every single discussion on HN is "The internet is still largely unregulated" because that discussion leads to "the internet is regulated by private bodies who got there first."
no one wants to admit that our employers and thus we benefit from this wild west of corruption.
ICANN, IANAL, CABF, Moz Security Council.... all made of of public corporations vying to make money.
Until
I agree that transparent and documented decisions are good evidence for not being corrupt, and I can see how you could argue that they're required (as a non-corrupt organisation that hides the reasoning behind its decisions is largely indistinguishable from a corrupt organisation that coincidentally makes the same decisions), but what do elections have to do with anything?
The .su ccTLD survived the collapse of the Soviet Union [0], with Russia maintaining it. It sounds like ICANN has tried to get rid of it but had too much opposition.
On the other hand, .yu expired after being managed by Serbia for a few years [1].
If I had to guess I'd say .io will likely follow .su, not .yu, because there's enough lobbying power behind the TLD to at least keep resolving the existing domains. But from what I can see the default course for a ccTLD is to get phased out when its corresponding country disappears.
Edit: gnfargbl found the actual written policy [3].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.su
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.yu
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41730559
> It sounds like ICANN has tried to get rid of it but had too much opposition.
Not my recollection. As far as I know ICANN said they will retire it, a handful of companies in Russia complained and ICANN said that if they want to retain it they need to get the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency to create an exceptional reservation. Today it has an exceptional reservation so .su won't be retired.
As for how that reservation was created and what the process is I don't know.
.su hopefully dies in the future. It is often used for cybercrime, neo-nazi websites and the russian controlled puppet government of certain russian controlled Ukrainian territories.
TIL that the USSR had its own TLD. As a child, I always thought .su domains were specifically for warez uses.
The GDR (East Germany) also had its own TLD, .dd (for Deutsche Demokratische Republik), but it was never operated in the global DNS and there were only like two registrations.
It's actually kinda crazy that it has been kept. I personally think resolvers should not resolve that zone at all.
The crazy thing is that there's a list of actually agreed-upon root name servers and they maintain a uniform namespace for the internet.
I suspect the above statement isn't actually a true statement across the world, but at least for today the list of roots isn't generically ideological in the same way a broad set of "obvious truths" is now ideological.
Yeah, with uniformly applied rules. Keeping .su is a violation of that and should be deprecated.
Oh, I'm referring to the list of root DNS servers.
https://www.iana.org/domains/root/servers
The rule is uniformly applied: there is a corresponding ccTLD for, and only for, every two-letter country code in the ISO list. You can complain about who the ISO list assigns country codes for, but that's a completely separate issue.
Wait till you learn how russia kept the seat of ussr on the UN Security Council.
I mean, the seat of USSR was given to the Russian Federation, as Russia is recognized as the continuation of the USSR, or do you mean something else?
I was always disappointed it didn't acquire a "regional" sort of appeal for businesses serving the CIS/former Soviet states, sort of like when they started to sell .eu domains towards an audience that wanted to imply "we're not just a .de or .fr company".
Curious what the trade aspects are like-- I'd expect there's a lot of industrial commonality and shared inherited legal norms, so if you're already doing business in one former Soviet republic, is it comparatively easy to expand to others?
Hey now, it's also popular for some kinds of piracy, it's not all hate crimes! Plus, I think there are a few pun-oriented domain names that use .su?
The .io registry is operated by Identity Digital which is a consolidation of a bunch of different registries from the last decade[1]. Identity Digital own (and sometimes just operate) many different TLDs and ccTLDs: most likely, the registrar will retain the right to operate the ccTLD and start paying license fees for each .io to Mauritius. The .tv ccTLD is the most famous example of this, as something like 15% of Tuvalu's GDP is from licensing of the .tv ccTLD.
[1] ICB acquired by Afilias, Afilias acquired by Donuts, Donuts rebranded to Identity Digital.
The ccTLD for Mauritius is .mu. The e British Indian Ocean territories stop existing once the UK releases its claims to the territories so there goes the country code of "io"
The country codes used for ccTLDs are arbitrary, I thought: they're roughly consistent with ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes but not exactly. Are there precedents to suggest a country can only have one ccTLD?
No, there's lots of counterexamples that are typically designed around subregions or territories (I understand there are nuances here, but this sets the general spirit of when this happens). The UK has .uk and .gb, US has .us and had .um , Austrailia has .au, .cx (Christmas Island), .cc (Cocos/Keeling Islands)
Had to look .gb up!
With the demise of X.400 e-mail and IANA's general aim of one TLD per country, use of .gb declined; the domain remains in existence, but it is not currently open to new domain registrations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.gb
NB I was curious as to whether .gb would be strict and exclude NI - who get to use .ie if they want...
I recall there was an outage 6 years ago. And many companies migrated to dot com over night.
https://hackernoon.com/stop-using-io-domain-names-for-produc...
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.
.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.
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.
This isn't quite true for Ascension or the Falkland Islands, they were both uninhabited when discovered and they're not part of any existing country
I'm not sure of the point you're making.
Sure, there's a lot of evidence that they were "terra nullius" before being claimed for the British empire. But the Chagos archipelago was inhabited utill its population was compulsorily expelled in the mid twentieth century.
I was surprised to discover that Ascension even has a ccTLD. I guess I assumed that the population was wholly military.
> I was surprised to discover that Ascension even has a ccTLD
That's because it was created by the same guy who created .io and .sh - British DNS "pioneer" Paul Kane, who clearly had a passion for finding remaining corners of the British Empire that could "claim" a bit of internet land (for his own profit).
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.
Why would the length of the domain name matter?
There are not that many two letter codes (a comment said 26*26= 676) and they are reserved for country codes. Global tlds are three letters and up (eg com org etc)
Well, this one is special, by virtue of being in widespread commercial use.
ICANN will act in whatever manner causes them the least trouble, which will be to retain the status quo. They have absolutely no incentive to behave otherwise.
> ICANN will act in whatever manner causes them the least trouble ... They have absolutely no incentive to behave otherwise
It's pretty detrimental to relationships when one side pre-declares their rules and policies, and then arbitrarily decides to ignore them.
I'd say they have a lot of incentive to behave in whatever way their published policies state, regardless of the impact to users of the cctld.
(I don't know what the policies are)
because there are fewer combinations of two-letter codes. This is also why they are reserved to actual countries.
Yeah but it's not like ISO is going to reuse the code "io" for some other future country.
You don't know that.
By policy, 2-letter TLDs are reserved for ccTLDs, matching ISO country codes.
> 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).
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).
> The land will go to Mauritius
Mauritius could decide to incorporate it as "Mauritius Indian Ocean Territory", hence maintaining the CC. I expect .io owners will likely suggest something like that, while showing them how much money they could get from a 10-15% deal similar to what Tuvalu has for .tv. Nobody likes to burn money.
I recognize this, but that’s the closest equivalent.
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...
This is a risk of using a ccTLD (of a country in which you don't reside) in your cute domain.
Well, my employers have a Mauritian domain. I shall have to volunteer to scope out the Mauritian tech scene, which, to be fair, I've heard positive things about before. So now I will have to do my research justice and attend in person.
This is an excellent plan and will doubtless pay long-term dividends for your employer who would be wise to fully fund your research. However do be aware that the μTech scene is largely a closed shop, and you shouldn't expect to make serious connections on your first visit. It's likely that you'll need to be there for at least a week every six months, perhaps for two or three years.
I think it warrants establishing a permanent base of operations, running continuous training sessions for the benefit of the whole company. Obviously I'm talking about on-site training, which is much more beneficial than remote courses.
In an ideal world, orphan TLDs should be kept alive until a new country with that code is born. New registrations should be closed though.
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.
Whether the registrar keeps doing business is irrelevant if the root nameservers stop serving NS for .io.
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.
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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.
The fact that there is an answer other than “every TLD will definitely exist until the death of the internet itself” is wild to me.
The "internet" has died several times already.
I doubt I could send email to anyone on bitnet or via a UUCP bang path, for example.
This iteration of the internet is pretty big; it may not die (where you live) but it will likely continue fragmenting into a loosely coupled set of affiliated networks with semi-realtime gateways between them (see also UUCP / bitnet).
> This iteration of the internet is pretty big; it may not die (where you live) but it will likely continue fragmenting into a loosely coupled set of affiliated networks [...]
Isn't the Internet already a "loosely coupled set of affiliated networks", with each AS being a separate network?
Yes -- to some degree. And "AS" could mean "BGP AS" or it could mean "country or alliance of countries" -- the internet as seen in the west vs iran are likely very different things.
Maybe skynet uses one set of roots and thenet uses a different set of roots and freenet has taken the IPs of the roots and sends you to their dns heirarchy and they also mandate that you have their set of CAs.
But as of right now people don't carry different phones to communicate on different internets (though they do have different chat / voice communication applications / networks).
UUCP / bitnet were (are?) store-and-forward gateway mechanisms. "If you want to send email to that google address you have to send it as friend@gmail.com@@freenet_audit and it'll be forwarded if the filters approve."
My point is that there have been a variety of different internets in the past; this one got the name "the internet" but there's no reason it won't fragment (more) into a morass semi-incompatible fragments.
When I go to parties, people think I know a lot about the internet.
I can't tell you how much I enjoyed reading this comment and realizing that I don't have a clue what half of this means. :D
Even plain ol' HTTP (no S) is slowly dying.
And if you boot up a machine from 10+ years ago, many sites won't work because they require TLS1.2+.
Nothing lasts forever :-/
The .io TLD will disappear, but given its huge use I expect ICANN to allow an especially long transition period.
Since it's two letters long, it cannot be retained as a generic TLD, as it's in the country TLD namespace and might be reused as such for a different country in the (very far) future. With only 26*26 = 676 possibilities and currently around 200 countries you just can't keep old codes around without an extremely good reason.
> The US-UK base will remain on Diego Garcia – a key factor enabling the deal to go forward at a time of growing geopolitical rivalries in the region between Western countries, India, and China.
So nothing really changes lol. Just a couple of paperwork remarks
I think this will depend on the treaty.
If Diego Garcia remains as UK-sovereign land, then since different laws (etc) apply it's likely ISO would keep the IO code for it.
If Mauritius keeps the islands they gain with a different status (tax, immigration and so on) compared to the rest of Mauritius, then a code might be needed for that — but Mauritius probably won't be keen on "IO".
If the whole lot becomes 'ordinary Mauritius' then the code is no longer needed and will be removed.
Per TFA, Mauritius will be able to resettle the other islands, so this isn't just a paperwork change.
> So nothing really changes lol
A crime against humanity begins to get fixed. Chagosians will finally be allowed to go back to their homes. Mauritius will get paid a rent for the lease of the Diego Garcia base from the US.
Also, Mauritius is a signatory of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and thus no nuclear weapons are allowed within its territory. TBD if there will be a special agreement allowing special sovereignty for the US/UK, which might allow the US to station nuclear weapons there (which it probably currently does).
So there's definitely change. The UK and US finally accepted their crime, which is extremely rare. Genuinely, are there other examples of them suffering consequences (even if their consequences are a return to the status quo, ish), for other of their violations of international law and/or crimes against humanity? None come to mind.
> Chagosians will finally be allowed to go back to their homes.
This is a reminder that these islands were uninhabited prior to European discovery.
It is true that they imported ... basically slaves ... from/via semi-nearby islands to work on it, but it's not like it was some ancestral island to them. When the work stopped, they were returned to the islands their ancestors came from (or at least via).
(This case is somewhat different than the also-originally-uninhabited Falkland Islands, where most people living there were always of European descent).
They still spent a few centuries there, similar to the Falkland islanders. Descent is irrelevant - a group of people has been living in a previously uninhabited place for a few centuries, it's their home.
And they weren't "returned", they were expelled from their homes and dumped somewhere else with no assistance.
That would be true if it were the same workers descending from prior workers. But especially in the last decades it was exactly the opposite.
> might allow the US to station nuclear weapons there (which it probably currently does)
It's a bit more than probable - being one of the very few places in the world where nuclear submarines can dock. It's also extremely unlikely to change; even if no specific verbiage is in the treaty, US/UK will likely continue to do as they please; Mauritius will simply look the other way in exchange for money and protection. Realpolitik is a thing.
Who would Mauritius need protection from?
Money will probably be the only thing to convince them.
Protection is not just about military matters - it's about relationships. Mauritius will likely want to push other stuff at the UN level, bid for money from international bodies, etc etc... US help in those matters will be valuable.
Chinese fishing fleets on the commercial side.
I'm not sure China would mind having a place to station assets either.
Mauritius will get 'financial support' for 'leasing' the military base and resettlement can happen on the other islands
There's no way the US would ever give up Diego Garcia without an actual fight, it's way too useful
Diego Garcia isn't the only island in the territory.
Link to BBC article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98ynejg4l5o
The UK will be retaining a 99 year lease on Diego Garcia, so I imagine .io can still be referring to that for another hundred years or so; in a similar way to how .hk still exists, and existed at all.
I’m accidentally cross posting this because I left this thread to find the link then searched on HN and posted it to the wrong one.
Worth reading Kevin Murphy’s piece here:
https://domainincite.com/30395-future-of-io-domains-uncertai...
Is there anything that can be done to petition ICANN or some other authority to help preserve this?
Why not post this as a URL?
I did, but none of the articles about this news that are currently available mention the .io issue.
The article says nothing about .Io, it's mostly about Diego Garcia.
draw.io has moved from the .io domain in 2020 . Their arguments were precise and persuasive. After that I do not know why would anyone stay on there.
https://www.drawio.com/blog/move-diagrams-net
Perhaps I'm just too cynical but I always see the movement from some more 'obscure' domain name to a 'household' .com / .net as a graduation of sorts.
Given that all the dictionary word .com/.nets got bought out a long long time before many of these startups, started up, a lot of money needs to change hands.
I don't know anything about the history of these particular TLDs, but this page really comes off as 'hey we now have a load of money and can afford to buy the .net we always wanted but it's actually it's for a good reason and we're better than those other hip new companies' - kinda like 'my expensive personalised number plate is actually raising awareness for world peace - your standard one means you don't care' or something.
Again, I'm just a complete outsider here, but that's my initial reaction. Maybe I'm just jaded.
An alternative view is that grandpa thinks .com is the internet, the same way he thinks that Chrome is the internet.
Their lead argument is "because colonialism", which is not a persuasive argument unless you have an ideological axe to grind. In general, people don't give a shit about upholding historical grievances or whatever, they simply want to get things done.
I will not be baited into discussing what people care and not care about but I will note there was a mass migration from the "master" branch to "main" branch. Food for thought.
To be more on topic, to quote:
there was a security issue with the .io domain. In 2017, a researcher managed to take control of four of the seven authoritative name servers for the .io domain. We accept that mistakes can happen, strong processes limit the chances of them happening, but they still can.
However, the domain administrator made no attempt, at any time, to communicate with anyone about the issue.
Without reading the article: do not ever depend on a dodgy ccTLD for your brand recognition or other important thing.
As if Verisign has never done anything shady.
The whole industry is full of shady operators, from top to bottom.
Like the Elgin Marbles, the UK won't return the lot.
good riddance.
[dead]
nothing
That is not possible. However it's possible that "not much" will happen, but the .io domain would have to move to the control of another country with the current rules in place. For historic precedent on this you can look at the .yu domain which was forcefully transferred to Serbia (more precisely FR Yugoslavia) when Slovenia did not want to give it up.
I don't think it's very likely that it will be retired given the state of .su.
I feel like some of you are going to run for politics in a few decades and owning a .io domain with no residence or operation in that part of the world, while technically not wrong at the time, will be the seen with the same disdain as blackface, cultural appropriation, or wearing a Nazi uniform to a Halloween party.
It seems in poor taste to use your privileges to perform digital colonization, revise the intention that .IO was never about Indian Ocean territory, and justify it all simply because it was a convenient way at the time for you to get attention and make money.
"That part of the world" - christ mate its just a military base
The fact that, as you say, "it's just a military base" is the consequence of the forced eviction of the local population (around 1,500 people) in 1968 by the US and the UK.
That’s not a lot of people. More people probably lost their homes to Hurricane Helene just this past couple of weeks. And the average Mauritian wasn’t even born in 1968.
I don't think that comparing a natural disaster/act of god to a foreign government forcibly relocating an entire culture is the right argument here.
If you stand by it, what is the correct number of people to have their rights systematically and intentionally violated before we should care?
Saigon fell in 1975. Millions of people fled the country in fear for their lives or gave up their children, with hundreds of thousands dying in the process. The fall of South Vietnam was a humanitarian catastrophe on a monumental scale, and basically no one cares about it anymore. And you’re expecting me to care about 1500 people being peacefully resettled from one island to another? All of this handwringing is a disingenuous excuse to vilify Britain and the West in general from the very same people who sympathize and make excuses for the Vietnamese communists even to this day.
Edit:
If we were holding a consistent standard here, we would have to say that the Vietnamese government should withdraw from illegally occupied South Vietnam and return it to the people who were violently displaced in 1975. Nobody advocates for this. Vietnam has somewhat liberalized into the kind of country that doesn’t do this sort of thing anymore and the refugees of 1975 and their descendants have built new lives in the countries they ended up in, including the United States. This sort of revanchism causes more problems than it solves, and there’s no obvious limit to it. Should Turkey return Constantinople to the Greeks? If we want to learn anything from history, it shouldn’t be a catalog of ancestral grudges to be settled; it should be that holding onto these grudges achieves nothing.
And blackface is just a costume. I think there's some necessary context to understand GP's comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Chagossians
There is a good "Behind the Bastards" episode about this event.
Also the Chagossian man in the Wikipedia article is incredibly jacked. I am assuming that physique is just from physical labor but holy cow.
> Also the Chagossian man in the Wikipedia article is incredibly jacked. I am assuming that physique is just from physical labor but holy cow.
He's probably 5'4" - 5'8" (and standing alone) which helps significantly.
Even if he is small, his muscle definition is very impressive. It's pretty cool that you can have that physique from regular physical labor.
I think you don’t realize how bad this sounds. Like, have you wondered why it’s “just a military base”?
in a few decades, you people will view five thousand other things with the same disdain.
no one outside your isolated little echo chambers gives a shit though.
"What do you mean, 'you people' ? "