this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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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).
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
.iofrom a ccTLD to a gTLD. "Rules" is not an answer.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.
I’m pretty sure it’s intentional that the owners of the top level domain set the rules for it. Why should ICANN control someone else’s portion of the internet?
This was especially a big deal as the internet expanded from the US to a global presence - you can understand why various countries wouldn’t want US control over their “territory”, wouldn’t cooperate without some form of self-determination
Exactly, and I say this as a US citizen who benefits from a US-centric system.
I'm not talking about ICANN or the US controlling other countries domains. This problem goes way back to net, org, com — basically all "rules" applied since inception were loosey goosey suggestions that depended on nothing more than convention, and were not well thought out.
So deleting
.iowould really be on-brand, and a continuation of that incompetence.Not at all. The rules were developed over time as the internet expanded from a handful of us research institutions to the global presence it is today. As other people in this thread mentioned, the present country code top level domain rules were developed from fiascoes like .su and .yu. Now they do have solid rules: they should follow them, regardless of corporate speculation and profiteering
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.
Still, too much money on
.ioto be shutdown.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.
Primarily, sure, but quite a few of them get abused, check the notes column. A glaring one these days is
.ai, as areyoutu.beand, of course,goatse.cx.Tuvalu make around $10 million a year- about one-sixth of their gdp- from licensing
.tv.Hilarious.
Why would how much money Mauritius might or might not make be any relevance to ICANN, a US non-profit?
Because money means influence. Whether it's the nation to benefit or the myriad of US tech companies that want it to stay, or other international interests, it's way too much potential influence and I suspect cannot be ignored for some strict adherence to rules that no one really would care to defend.
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.
luckily those are their internal rules and now international laws that can't be broken.
THere's literally 0 reason they can't just go "well, this tld is too big. it's generic now"
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23738871.2023.2238723
While I agree with you in that ICANN will probably save .io through some policy change it isn't as easy as just saying "screw all our policies, this ccTLD is now a gTLD." considering the fighting going on regarding it.
You sweet summer child...
.iois just too big to fail.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
IIRC two letter domains are reserved for country specific domains, the non-country domains start with three letters.
For anyone who is not familiar, your day would surely be improved by watching the Map Men video on this topic.
"They have to get rid of it unless they decide not to."
I assume it's just gonna be inherited by Mauritius.
Then it's going to be an autonomous territory (like e.g. the Faroer) called the Mauritian Indian Ocean Territory. Countries don't need to be sovereign to exist and have ISO codes. If Mauritius wants to they can do it even if the IANA insists on the letter of their rules.