[andyjohnson0]

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.

[ifwinterco]

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

[andyjohnson0]

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.

[toyg]

> 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).

[chippiewill]

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.

[andyjohnson0]

Why would the length of the domain name matter?

[kjs3]

By policy, 2-letter TLDs are reserved for ccTLDs, matching ISO country codes.

[MobiusHorizons]

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)

[CamperBob2]

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.

[oarsinsync]

> 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)

[toyg]

because there are fewer combinations of two-letter codes. This is also why they are reserved to actual countries.

[eli]

Yeah but it's not like ISO is going to reuse the code "io" for some other future country.

[toyg]

You don't know that.