[noirscape]

It should eventually get removed by ICANN, since the country code TLDs are managed by ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 (it's however not an exact match), and the transfer will mean the British Indian Ocean Territories will no longer exist. ISO is going to be the entity in charge of removing the io country code, which it probably will do since ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 isn't just used for domain names. There's a standardized process for this; from the top of my head, you'll have 3-5 years before the TLD fully vanishes and for current domains to expire. (Also, because it's a country code, certain protections you're supposed to have as a domain owner won't apply to you; ICANN basically gives up underlying management of the ccTLD space to the countries that own them, meaning anything you're given is at the grace of the country owning them - this applies for all ccTLDs, which is why some UK domain owners suddenly lost control over their .eu domains when Brexit happened.)

It's not the first time a TLD has been removed; a couple of TLDs have been scrapped in the past when countries split up or got merged (chiefly in the aftermath of the cold war)[0]. For the most part, those domain names weren't in heavy use. There's also a few high-profile failures of removal: .uk was used instead of .gb in the early days of the internet before 2-letter codes were standardized to ISO, which is why the UK uses .uk instead of .gb (an attempt to scrap .uk was attempted, but failed almost immediately). .su also should have been scrapped ages ago, but because the Russian entity that manages it refuses to cooperate with ICANN, the TLD is still in use, from what I can tell just because they don't want to risk breaking the internet.

The .su TLD is the one with the closest amount of use as the .io TLD has today. That said, it's unlikely that the entity currently managing .io (a hedge fund if I'm not mistaken) has the legal muscle to force ICANN to keep it in the list, the way the Russian domain name registrar has been able to.

[0]: See a more detailed explanation here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain#...

[michaelt]

> That said, it's unlikely that the entity currently managing .io (a hedge fund if I'm not mistaken) has the legal muscle to force ICANN to keep it in the list

ICANN periodically lets anyone with $1 million create random new generic TLDs like .top and .win and .google and .hiv and .amazon and .zip - it's pretty clear there aren't any real rules or standards for TLDs apart from having money.

Why should ICANN break things for .io and its users, when they could instead keep things working, and extract $1M from a hedge fund, at the same time?

[noirscape]

> ICANN periodically lets anyone with $1 million create random new generic TLDs like .top and .win and .google and .hiv and .amazon and .zip - it's pretty clear there aren't any real rules or standards for TLDs apart from having money.

There's actually a bunch of rules gTLDs have to follow compared to ccTLDs. The main one I know of is that they can't randomly screw you over if you've already registered a domain name with them - they're allowed to force conditions on initial signups, but they are required to respond to things like trademark disputes in the ICANN process or domain name registrar transfers (if you ever wondered why this is a relatively easy thing - it's because ICANN punishes registrars that don't cooperate).

Freenom got in a lot of trouble back in the day for not following the rules and got suspended+fined a few times by ICANN for gTLD registrations. It took a Facebook lawsuit for them to finally go under though.

> Why should ICANN break things for .io and its users, when they could instead keep things working, and extract $1M from a hedge fund, at the same time?

Because ccTLDs follow a different standard. ICANN makes no money from ccTLDs - they're given to the country that owns the territory in question (or whatever pseudo-legal authority comes closest), and the country then has the right to sublicense out the right to those TLDs under any conditions it wants to use. Some countries don't let you do top-level registrations or any registrations at all, reserving the entire space for government websites. Others make them basically open to registration by anyone. ICANN has no real financial ties for .io in specific; any money that the hedge fund pays for it goes to the British government.

This system as I understand it, is this way in part to appease countries that would otherwise have bad relationships with the US to accept ICANN as the central naming authority of the internet even though it's a US-based entity; 2 letter TLDs are given to the country in question and in exchange, they follow the other rules of ICANN.

Making an exception would basically require the UK to make a fuss about it (since that's what Russia did with .su), which seems unlikely given the UK is also changing the legal status of the British Indian Ocean Territories in such a way that they cease to exist.

[toyg]

> Because ccTLDs follow a different standard

They will just move .io from ccTLD to gTLD, with the UK government's blessing. Everyone realizes there is no point in stopping the money from flowing.

[noirscape]

They probably won't, the 2 character space is reserved for ccTLDs by their existing policies.

Only 3 characters and up can be gTLDs.

[chatmasta]

It’s insane that anyone thinks ICANN will deprecate one of the most popular TLDs. There is no incentive by anyone for this to happen.

[toyg]

If the money is good enough, they will make a "grandfathered" exception.

Modern ICANN is not about policies for policies' sake.

[actionfromafar]

Aren’t two letter codes reserved for countries though IIRC.

[wongarsu]

country-ish entities. For example European Union has .eu despite not being a country. They gave Taiwan one while simultaneously calling it "Taiwan, Province of China". And Russia has three: .ru, .рф and .su. The latter arguably falls in the same category as .io since the Soviet Union has ceased to exist, yet ripn.su is still active and you can apparently still get new .su domains

[tonyhart7]

people forget the fact that countries can break up in the future

example: what happen if canada break up into 2 different state that want to their unique tld???? also what happen to current .ca ??? do you migrate all that domain and .ca ceased to exist????

internet is faily new in terms of human history (30+ years) while countries or kingdom has been ceased to exist and "rebrand" all the time

its not so simple to just put on "acronym" countries name

[nl]

This happened to Yugoslavia

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.yu

[tonyhart7]

exactly, this is happen to "old days" of internet and they need years to get rid of that

I cant imagine nation have enough power that can keep these thing for years just for historical standpoint

[kelnos]

> I cant imagine nation have enough power that can keep these thing for years just for historical standpoint

.su is one such domain. The Soviet Union of course no longer exists, but .su continues on. ICANN has told Russia they want to phase it out by 2030 (after Russia more or less refused to shut it down in the 90s), but who knows if that will happen.

.su even still accepts new domain registrations!

I think you can predict the average kind of people who wants a .su domain, though...

[koakuma-chan]

> ICANN periodically lets anyone with $1 million create random new generic TLDs

Why? Isn't ICANN non profit?

[bryanrasmussen]

I'm sure any profit they make is redirected back into the organization's mission.

[koakuma-chan]

I still don't get by which virtue they can decide to sell TLDs for 1 million dollars or any other large sum of money. We just ended up having big companies like Google register .google, etc, and random questionable companies register, e.g., .law, .plumbing, etc, presumably for profit. I'm sure ICANN could do better than this.

[da_chicken]

That's not what nonprofit means.

[nine_k]

Am I the only one who sees no upside whatsoever in sunsetting a well-established, widely used, reasonably operated TLD?

To my mind, the only reason to unregister a TLD would be the TLD falling into disuse (the registrar having gone incomunicado, too-level DNS servers unmaintained, etc), and nobody agreeing to pick it up at the price of a new TLD ($1M?).

[rschiavone]

There is a lot of money to be made from the .io domain. My guess is that it will continue to exist as some kind of gTLD. Google already treats it like that.

[kevin_thibedeau]

It'll stay grandfathered like .su which has essentially no reason to still exist.

[gizajob]

Why is not using .gb a mistake? The official name of the country is The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - Great Britain is the island containing England, Scotland and Wales. The UK also contains Northern Ireland. It would be nonsensical (technically) for Northern Irish businesses to have domains ending in .gb

[qingcharles]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:GB

[noirscape]

Because "uk" isn't in ISO 3166-1 alpha 2, "gb" is, and the formal designation for The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is "gb".

It wouldn't be nonsense for northern Irish businesses to have .gb domains, because that's what the ISO convention says it would be.

The change will basically never happen though; ICANN has basically acquiesced any attempt to change it (after a weak attempt to do so in the 90s), and since it's pretty unlikely in the near future that another country gets "uk" as their alpha 2 designation, they aren't in any hurry to force the matter. "gb" is still marked as reserved though.

[roryirvine]

In the early 2000s I did a bit of consultancy for a company that'd done a deal with Nicaragua's NIC to offer ".co.ni" domains to businesses in Northern Ireland (at the time, the commercial second level domain in Nicaragua was .com.ni, so there wasn't a conflict with existing use).

Unfortunately the venture failed (and I went unpaid!), but the Nicaraguan NIC stepped in to continue service for the handful of .co.ni domains that had been registered at that point.

There'd been a similar effort for Scotland, using both .co.sc and .co.al (for Alba, in Scots Gaelic), but it was even less successful.

These days, there are gTLDs with .scot, .cymru, .wales, and .london existing since 2014-ish. There'll be another round of gTLD applications next year, so I suppose someone might register .unitedkingdom or .ukogbani, but the domain name goldrush days are long over...

[gizajob]

Hail our ukogbani overlords.

Sorry to hear you didn’t get paid.

[gizajob]

Well half of Northern Ireland would happily burn your ISO rulebook to the ground. Plus nobody says “I’m from GB” when abroad, we all say “I’m from the UK”. Country is called UK.

[arethuza]

I thought most people would say which part of the UK they are from: England, Scotland, Wales or NI?

[gizajob]

Yeah that happens too. I generally say UK. In Europe I’m maybe prone to saying England/English perhaps, like in Italy “Io sono Inglese” but in the UK my parents are welsh and I was born in England so don’t really identify with either very strongly. Particularly because I’m a scouser, like you’d identify yourself to other British people by your accent if you have a strong obvious one. Regardless though nobody says “GB”.

[N19PEDL2]

> It should eventually get removed by ICANN, since the country code TLDs are managed by ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 (it's however not an exact match), and the transfer will mean the British Indian Ocean Territories will no longer exist. ISO is going to be the entity in charge of removing the io country code, which it probably will do since ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 isn't just used for domain names.

Side note: I suspect the real reason Google wants to discontinue goo.gl links is because they believe Trump will eventually succeed in annexing Greenland to the US.