Recent and related:
Future of .io domains uncertain as UK hands over Chagos islands - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41788805 - Oct 2024 (17 comments)
Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the Chagos Islands? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729526 - Oct 2024 (204 comments)
UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729325 - Oct 2024 (282 comments)
.io will cease to exist as a ccTLD, but it doesn't mean it can't exist as commercial TLD like .app, considering its widespread use. I think eventually it will be auctioned off.
According to current rules, it can't. Only ccTLDs have two letters.
As the article says, money talks.
TIL that .co is for Colombia. Goddam. I was about to buy a .co domain. I guess I'll have to shell out an extra $50k for .com just in case any more geopolotics happens in my lifetime :/
$50k for a domain? these days?
“Interest rates could have been way higher”
time to change the rules
[removing as posted in the wrong place]
Wrong post, you meant to reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41793658.
You are right! I'll post there and delete the above. Thanks for pointing that out!
question is, was that user error, or a system error. I've had that happen to me, and I don't believe it was operator error, which implies there's a bug in arc that happens every once in a while where a http POST goes to the wrong place.
> I don't believe it was operator error
Honestly, it probably was. Usually is.
FWIW I would not consider my post above evidence of a bug. At the time I was suffering from a lack of sleep and other stressors.
IANA has documentation that outlines what happens in the retirement of a country code top level domain here: https://www.iana.org/help/cctld-retirement
tl;dr, if it happens, there will be a 5 year retirement period. We have quite a while to deal with this it seems. This isn't a nothing-sandwich, but pretty close (unless your company is something .io)
Im confused by this speculation as the .io TLD isnt owned by that country and it isnt disappearing...
It doesn't matter who "owns" it (the country probably outsourced management of it to another entity, I assume); the domain exists because it exists as an ISO country code. When the country is no longer a country, and the IO country code is removed from ISO 3166-1, the justification for the domain existing will be gone. The article is saying that per current IANA policies, that should trigger the domain to be retired over a period of several years.
Personally, I do find it highly unlikely the domain will go away. They'll do something to keep it around. As the article states toward the end, "The IANA may fudge its own rules and allow .io to continue to exist. Money talks, and there is a lot of it tied up in .io domains."
ISO 3166-1 defines codes for "countries, territories, or areas of geographical interest". When the country is no longer a country, the country it's becoming part of might very decide to treat it as something still deserving an ISO code and thus a ccTLD. (and such a status makes sense for pure geographical reasons, its >2000km from Mauritius)
I believe the reasoning is that the list was originally used for post, so far-flung regions of a country may have their own codes, even if they're not politically separate. GF, French Guiana, is a good example. Politically, it's merely a region of France, but it still gets its own code.
If Mauritius decided to used a variant of Chagos/Chagas (so probably CS, since that's the only available code that still somehow fits) then IO will probably be ejected from ISO 3166.
Honestly if they get .cs, it would be another nice money maker
Soviet Union does not exist and SU domain is not retired.
The article addresses this: what happened with .su is part of what caused ICANN/IANA to update their policies to not have defunct country codes stick around.
Additionally (and more importantly), SU is still reserved in the ISO 3166 list (https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:code:3166:SU), so if United Kingdom somehow convinced ISO 3166 MA to reserve IO then it will be messy.
> Soviet Union does not exist
That's what KGB wants you to think
KGB also doesn't exist anymore because it was renamed FSB.
Seems they were referring to the "USSR Returns" subplot of Season 9, Episode 19:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson_Tide
Ironically, there's some unintended truth in their reference (i.e. to all intents and purposes the KGB hasn't gone anywhere and basically is still around, just renamed/reorged) but that's an entirely different thread.
KGB was split to what is now SVR (ex 1st main department) and what is now FSB (2nd main department), with some other organizations taking remaining roles.
These days however, the Russian intelligence landscape is more complicated, with multiple semi-private organizations, informal groups, and other stakeholders.