For very good reasons, the .io
TLD is (likely) going away.
Once this treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist. Various international bodies will update their records. In particular, the International Standard for Organization (ISO) will remove country code “IO” from its specification. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which creates and delegates top-level domains, uses this specification to determine which top-level country domains should exist. Once IO is removed, the IANA will refuse to allow any new registrations with a .io domain. It will also automatically begin the process of retiring existing ones. (There is no official count of the number of extant .io domains.)
https://every.to/p/the-disappearance-of-an-internet-domain
(H/t @mwl )
@mttaggart @mwl I don't think this is actually going to happen.
There's so much stuff relying on .io at this point that I won't be surprised if major DNS providers just sidestep ICAN and take matters into their own hands.
ICAN isn't omniscient and omnipotent, if the majority of the world decides that they shouldn't be in charge of DNS any more and that we'd rather use a different set of root servers, their power basically goes away.
@mttaggart @mwl You wouldn't even necessarily have to go through with it; a credible threat of it happening could motivate ICAN to do the right thing here.
@miki @mttaggart @mwl A threat from? In the past it was from UN to take over both names and IP addresses management worldwide. See how much that happened... (new world conferences were created and exist today just for that history)