[andygcook]

According to Verisign, there’s over 1.5M domains registered on the .io TLD.

According to this Wikipedia entry, there were 800 domains registered on the .an TLD the year it was phased out.

Who knows what ICANN will do, but my guess is there will be a lot more pressure to keep the .io domain going even though the British Indian Ocean Territory is being ceded to Mauritius (.mu) at some point.

[pelagicAustral]

But, I mean, they can keep it, right? à la .SU

[notpushkin]

IIRC they put some administrative protections in place after Russia declined to give up .su – this is why we don't have .yu, despite Serbia (I think) wanting to keep it. Perhaps those can be overruled, though.

[voytec]

ICANN and IANA could effectively delist .su despite Russian Federation's "decline".

How much silly and outdated the WHOIS protocol is, the client queries IANA and only then is forwarded to RIPN (Russian Institute for Public Networks).

[exe34]

can Russia force local clients to go through ripn? it would fragment the web further but it's not like others haven't done their own fragmenting.

[voytec]

I'd guess that it's actually a requirement. Domains registered under ccTLDs (country-code top level domains) are managed by regional bodies[0]. In case of .su, it's either RIPN or ROSNIIROS[1] which manages the registry and registrations.

But again - IANA is universally queried about given TLD and redirects the query to regional body. In case of .su:

    > whois yandex.su
    
    % IANA WHOIS server
    % for more information on IANA, visit http://www.iana.org
    % This query returned 1 object
    
    refer:        whois.tcinet.ru
    domain:       SU
    organisation: Russian Institute for Development of Public Networks
    organisation: (ROSNIIROS)
    
    (...)
    
    # whois.tcinet.ru
    % TCI Whois Service. Terms of use:
    % https://tcinet.ru/documents/whois_ru_rf.pdf (in Russian)
    % https://tcinet.ru/documents/whois_su.pdf (in Russian)
    
    domain:        YANDEX.SU
    nserver:       ns1.snparking.ru.
    (...)
    state:         REGISTERED, DELEGATED

[0] USUALLY; .tk, .ga, .cf, .gq were managed by by infamous Freenom due to incapability of owners to do it themselves

[1] https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/su.html

[notpushkin]

> USUALLY

I think it's actually fairly common to delegate, no? .io was ran by just one guy at some point (or so I've heard). .us is run by GoDaddy (but I think the US government does keep them in check).