One of our spinoff companies wants to act so badly like a start up and be edgy they moved everything to a .io domain. This would be icing on the cake for how cowboy they manage everything.
while funny, it would cause me so many headaches either directly or indirectly that is completely cancels out
It would cause me a large number of professional headaches but I still think it’ll be funnier than that.
My company didn’t jump on the
.io
bandwagon, so it would just be a bunch of random dead links.So for me, it should be net funny.
I’m pretty sure our site uses a CDN that is
.io
so that going to be interesting.
Yes, there is laws, IANA says that ideally in 3-5 years all the .io will be gone, like the .yu ones, they do not exist anymore.
I doubt it. The cited precedent of .yu didn’t have a ton of big international commercial interest, but .io does.
They will absolutely find a rationale to change what io means when ISO retires io. The “laws” will be tweaked, ignored, or loopholed around.
They’re not laws anyway. They are just things that ICANN say. It’s very easy to change the rules it’s not like they have to be consulted on or anything
The .su domain is still active and the Soviet Union does not exist for more than 30 years now.
yes because at the time they didn’t know what to do, and gave .su to the .ru guys. For .yu it was also a little bit messy with multiple new countries wanting to control it. This is when IANA made laws to properly handle end of ccTLD like this, .yu does not exist anymore, it will be the same for .io
RIP itch.io
I’m surprised it’s not mentioned in the article, but also complicating this situation is the Chagos refugees seeking to take control of the TLD and/or receive reparations from the current registrar.
Jesus Christ this will be a major pain in the ass if it goes through… I’m really not in the mood of having to reconfigure all my self hosted services to a new domain.
Do it anyway. Having anything behind a TLD that is tied to the political control of a tiny geographic area is insanely careless
Maybe, but I had no idea this was tied to a country. I thought it was a novelty tld, like xyz and art. You know, like input/output so io.
All two letter domains are country-code domains.
No.
Why would Mauritius turn down a source of revenue?
Because .io is the top level country code domain for the British Indian Ocean Territory, and once a country ceases to exist, the top level domain is supposed to be phased out according to the IANA rules and eventually discontinued by the ICANN.
There are no .yu, .dd, .cs, or .tp domains left. The only exception I know is .su (soviet union).There’s plenty of non country domains too. Just make it into some acronym or have it mean I/O or whatever.
There are sure, but none are two letters because those are restricted to country codes. Specifically the ISO 3166-1 alpha 2
Well they better make another damn exception.
The only reason .su still exists is because Russia said they would decommission it and then never did. ICANN chose not to let that happen again, which explains their choice to decommission the later ones.
What the fuck is the point of decommissioning them entirely, though? What value does that do anybody? Is there another country waiting in the wings? There are 1500 TLD’s already.
The obvious non-dickhead solution would be to transition the mgmt of
.io
from a ccTLD to a gTLD. “Rules” is not an answer.ccTLDs are pointless anyway. They always end up getting used in unexpected ways and it always causes problems. It doesn’t do anyone any real benefit having them exist anyway. For example the US doesn’t even use theirs.
The sensible thing to do would be to stop worrying about it and just let it carry on existing.
Even Google uses a ccTLD for that link shortener for YouTube.
Yeah, the whole concept of “national” TLDs is proving to be a rather poor one in practice. Very few of them actually make sense in the way they’re used.
That sounds more like an issue of enforcement than anything. If anyone can register a domain with your country’s extension, it’s not really your country’s extension.
If we handled it properly, those domains would have value.
Yes, but when management fails the impact should not be imposed on the subordinates for following the process; it should be entirely on management.
In practice, this would mean creating a more stringent DNS approach to ccTLD’s that does not impact existing domains until if/when they choose to adopt it. Ultimately it just shows ICANN’s inadequacy &/or incompetence, which I guarantee has more to do with it’s management than it’s engineers/workers.
Still, too much money on
.io
to be shutdown.Well, they should have chosen a gTld
So they could just transform .io to a gTLD without causing any downtime.
EDIT: Apparently not that easy :(
2.12 Can a New gTLD name be 2 letters?
Applied-for gTLD strings in ASCII must be composed of three or more visually distinct characters. Two-character ASCII strings are not permitted, to avoid conflicting with current and future country-codes based on the ISO 3166-1 standard.
Either way a policy change is needed.
Maybe. But it’s up to ICANN and their rules, money might not be relevant to them, and with .io, there literally isn’t a single person or company that uses it “correctly” as country TLDs are primarily intended to be used by entities connected to that country, and the territory has no permanent residents, unlike with .su.
On the flip side, that might work for the case too as well - maybe ICANN decides to make it a generic TLD, like .com or .org instead as it’s not really directly connected to a country?
We shall see.as country TLDs are primarily intended to be used by entities connected to that country
Primarily, sure, but quite a few of them get abused, check the notes column. A glaring one these days is
.ai
, as areyoutu.be
and, of course,goatse.cx
.Tuvalu make around $10 million a year- about one-sixth of their gdp- from licensing
.tv
.
Why not just let people have whatever suffix they want?
They do, that’s why this is an issue in the first place. The purpose of ccTLDs is to host domains associated with a particular country. If the country stops existing, there’s no reason to use that country’s ccTLD. The problem is they let anyone register domains under this ccTLD even if they have no association with that country, hence the situation we’re in.
Actually I believe you had to be a British national to register. Well at least you’re supposed to be a British national I’m not sure how much they checked.
Zero checking. Anyone can register a .io. You can go register one right now in 5 minutes if you wanted.
TLDR: no
Interesting to see how no one bothered to read the article.
Real TL;DR: Maybe.
History tells us YES. Money tells us NO.
I did read the article. The answer is inconclusive not an definitive no.
According to all the rules it should stop existing, taking common sense into account it’ll carry on. Thing is it remains to be seen where the common sense will be taken into account. Common sense isn’t all that common.