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A comment on Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the Chagos Islands?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by lolinder on Thursday October 03, 2024 @08:55AM (#41730333)
As far as I can find .su is the exception in surviving, not the rule, and who operated the ccTLD is irrelevant to the question of whether ICANN decides to allow it to live on.

It does seem likely that ICANN won't kill off all existing registrations, but this is supposition, not an answer. If we look only at what they've done historically to ccTLDs the most likely outcome is that new registrations become locked and ICANN attempts to phase the .io TLD out.

They may break that trend now given how much they've already polluted the TLD space, but they may not, and I think your comment is a bit too optimistic. People with .io domains should absolutely be paying close attention here.

Edit: gnfargbl found the actual written policy [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41730559

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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by margalabargala on Thursday October 03, 2024 @10:04AM (#41730919)
I can't be the only person who read this and was curious about what other ccTLDs have existed and have since been removed, so here's the list of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain#...

There was also a .um for US minor outlying islands, removed in 2008.

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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by dtech on Thursday October 03, 2024 @10:37AM (#41731201)
That list doesn't seems complete, ".an" at least isn't in there [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.an

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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by card_zero on Thursday October 03, 2024 @01:27PM (#41732811)
That section doesn't attempt to maintain a full list.
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by the_mitsuhiko on Thursday October 03, 2024 @10:10AM (#41730977)
That's not entirely true. .su is an exceptional reservation but it's not the only one with a tld. For instance ".uk" exists and ".ac" exists.

It's absolutely possible that someone will asking for an exceptional reservation for IO at ISO and it can be kept alive forever.

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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by lolinder on Thursday October 03, 2024 @10:15AM (#41731024)
> It's absolutely possible that someone will asking for an exceptional reservation for IO at ISO and it can be kept alive forever.

I agree it's possible, I disagree with OP that it's a foregone conclusion.

At this point if I were the owner of a .io domain I would treat that as the unlikely best case scenario and start looking at what domain I'd fall back to if ICANN sticks to their rules.

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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by mywittyname on Thursday October 03, 2024 @11:26AM (#41731652)
I mean, the TLD .pizza exists, so could .io move to the same mechanism that allows those to exist? Or is it something like 2-3 character TLDs are reserved for country codes?
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by lolinder on Thursday October 03, 2024 @11:40AM (#41731760)
Two character TLDs are reserved for country codes, and they're meant to reflect a very specific ISO-standardized list of country codes:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

Breaking with ISO 3166-1 comes with the risk that a new ISO-standardized country cannot claim its TLD.

So in order to reclaim the TLD as generic, startups dont just have to persuade ICANN, they have to make the case to ISO that IO is a significant enough code that it should be an "exceptional reservation" like UK, UN, EU, and SU.

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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by mintplant on Thursday October 03, 2024 @11:38AM (#41731747)
Two-character TLDs are reserved for country codes, yes.
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by saaaaaam on Thursday October 03, 2024 @04:18PM (#41734534)
.pizza is a gTLD (generic top level domain) rather than a ccTLD (country code top level domain). ICANN rules say that gTLDs have to have three characters or more. So you can have .xyz but not .xo
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by roryirvine on Thursday October 03, 2024 @12:32PM (#41732285)
.uk only exists because UKERNA was already using it (or, rather, UK.) for JANET's own X500-ish system that pre-dates the standardisation of DNS.

At one point, it was intended that moving the UK's internet resources to .gb would be the final stage of the transition from the internal JANET system.

By the time I first heard about that in the early 90s, that had already gained legendary "that'll never happen" status - and, sure enough, the transition was declared complete when the last UK.AC.SITE <-> ac.uk mail gateways were retired circa 1996.

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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by anotherhue on Thursday October 03, 2024 @01:40PM (#41732918)
There are non GB UK countries though, or at least one in NI.
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by alexchamberlain on Thursday October 03, 2024 @01:55PM (#41733076)
Right, but confusingly, GB is the ISO 2 code for the United Kingdom, even though the United Kingdom is much bigger than Great Britain, where the GB abbreviation comes from.
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by anotherhue on Thursday October 03, 2024 @01:58PM (#41733115)
Makes sense, also in keeping with the excessively complicated naming that thousands of years of dispute produces.
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by vidarh on Thursday October 03, 2024 @07:23PM (#41736114)
Pet hate: Regularly running into dropdowns that list countries by name, but sort them by country code.
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by glimmung on Friday October 04, 2024 @03:59PM (#41745045)
Thanks for explaining where that apparently random ordering comes from - drives me nuts too!
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by beojan on Thursday October 03, 2024 @11:12PM (#41737435)
At least for the identification sticker / stripe on cars we've moved from GB to UK. Maybe we'll just move to uk as the ISO 2 letter code.
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by TRiG_Ireland on Friday October 04, 2024 @11:49AM (#41742637)
IVR codes are not ISO 3166-1 codes. The ISO codes are all two letters; the IVR codes range from one to three letters.
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by alexchamberlain on Saturday October 05, 2024 @07:28AM (#41749158)
https://web.archive.org/web/20120616044022/http://www.iso.or...

Apparently "United" and "Kingdom" aren't valid for ISO, so they went with ignoring part of the name completely.

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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by xp84 on Saturday October 05, 2024 @11:58AM (#41750771)
That’s interesting. It kind of makes sense. I guess the US makes this rule kind of funny too. I guess we’re lucky we didn’t get .am for “America.”
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by ethbr1 on Thursday October 03, 2024 @01:49PM (#41733012)
.im
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by jamesog on Thursday October 03, 2024 @02:40PM (#41733568)
The Isle of Man isn't part of the UK, but rather a Crown Dependency, as are Jersey (.je) and Guernsey (.gg): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Dependencies
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by magicalhippo on Thursday October 03, 2024 @10:34AM (#41731168)
Perhaps naive question: why can't they simply convert it from a ccTLD to a gTLD?
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by lolinder on Thursday October 03, 2024 @10:41AM (#41731246)
Two-letter domains are defined to be ccTLDs—if it's two letters, it's a country code domain. Breaking that rule would risk leaving a future ISO-standardized country unable to claim its domain because its code was already assigned to a tech startup gTLD.
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by jowea on Thursday October 03, 2024 @02:27PM (#41733433)
Would a future ISO-standardized country get assigned a code that collides with an historical code?
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by Dibby053 on Thursday October 03, 2024 @03:02PM (#41733814)
The short-lived country of Serbia and Montenegro got assigned .cs (from Crna Gora - Srbija) which previously belonged to Czechoslovakia, but it seems it was never used (they kept using .yu).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.cs

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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by mr_toad on Friday October 04, 2024 @04:06AM (#41738988)
Reusing country codes seems like it would annoy a lot of DBAs, not just people involved with the domain name system.
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by kjs3 on Thursday October 03, 2024 @03:16PM (#41733952)
I've heard it discussed as a possibility tho I don't personally know how the ISO CC assignment process works. On the other hand, we don't exactly create new countries at a rate that exhausting 26^2 combinations should be an issue, but I suppose that could change.
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by chrismorgan on Friday October 04, 2024 @03:56AM (#41738918)
There are only 334 unassigned and unreserved <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2#Decoding_ta...>. That’s honestly not that many. More to the point, there’s a distinct preference for names meaning something. Sometimes you can’t get exactly what you want: for example, Australia and Austria both start with AU, and only one of them could get AU. I dunno how Austria got AT, but was it “Australia gets AU, AS makes more sense for American Samoa, AR makes more sense for Argentina… guess AT is the best we can give them”?

Jump a hundred years forwards to a hypothetical future where the USA is fragmenting, Iowa becomes a country, IA and IW are already assigned to some other countries that have sprung up, and ISO is somehow still relevant. When Iowa says “we want IO”, what do you say? “Sorry, we used that code a hundred years ago for a tiny island in the middle of nowhere, how do you feel about YA, it sounds a little like Iowa, right?”

(Admittedly if the USA fragmented, each state into a country, you’d have far worse problems than Iowa. Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana… eight Ms, and already M_ is down to only three available, MB, MI and MJ. M is a popular letter to start names with.)

There are already a few country codes assigned where I can’t see where the second letter came from, e.g. AW, AX, BJ, BQ, CW, GW, SX, PW. A definite habit of giving a W or X if they can’t come up with anything better.

A few country codes have already been reassigned once (having formerly been either assigned or reserved indefinitely, then deleted): AI, BQ, GE, LT, ME, RU, SK.

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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by mr_toad on Friday October 04, 2024 @04:09AM (#41739008)
So what happens if the ISO decides to switch to three letter codes and screws a bunch of TLDs?
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by chrismorgan on Friday October 04, 2024 @05:32AM (#41739546)
They could certainly say “we’re giving up on alpha-2 codes, new countries only get alpha-3 codes”. But it’d be rather difficult, as there’s a lot of software using alpha-2 codes. I imagine ISO and ICANN would talk, and maybe ISO 3166/MA would reserve any extant three-letter TLDs, so ICANN say “no new three-letter TLDs except for new countries”. That’d solve the issue entirely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-3

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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by kjs3 on Monday October 07, 2024 @10:46AM (#41766522)
Agreed. It's important to bear in mind that DNS is one thing that uses ISO3166, but by no means the only thing.
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by magicalhippo on Thursday October 03, 2024 @08:16PM (#41736481)
Fair enough. One could alleviate that concern by not opening gTLD for general two-letter registrations, reserving it for these special cases, but the core issue would remain.
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by lolinder on Thursday October 03, 2024 @11:14PM (#41737443)
They've done that a couple times (EU, UK, SU), but each of those was first reserved as an exception in the ISO standard. So that's probably where proponents of .io would need to start.
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by not2b on Thursday October 03, 2024 @01:02PM (#41732574)
They might just change its status to a vanity top level domain like ".lol" or ".sucks" and sell it to the highest bidder, taking the money. They would justify it by saying that they want to promote stability, maybe require that the new owner honor the domains at least until they expire and then charge what they want. That seems to be the way ICANN works these days.
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by dogma1138 on Thursday October 03, 2024 @01:27PM (#41732808)
It doesn’t matter really what ICANN decides if the registrars ignore it.
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by crote on Thursday October 03, 2024 @01:33PM (#41732865)
And it doesn't matter what the registrars choose to do when the entire ".io" TLD gets kicked out of the root name servers - who in turn are following the official zone file as published by ICANN.

Accepting registrations for a domain is pretty useless when those domains aren't going to resolve to anything.

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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by alexchamberlain on Thursday October 03, 2024 @01:57PM (#41733094)
But do the root name servers _have_ to respect the ICANN zone file?
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by notatoad on Thursday October 03, 2024 @02:13PM (#41733289)
at least one of the root name servers is hosted by ICANN, so there's essentially zero chance that all of the roots will choose to disrgard the ICANN zone file.
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by dogma1138 on Thursday October 03, 2024 @03:02PM (#41733812)
If an ICANN decision would be seen as detrimental to the smooth operation of the global DNS network yes there is, their server would simply be quarantined yes it would be a problem since root servers are “hardcoded” in many places but for the most part all the major DNS services can continue to operate without them for a while at least.
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Re:Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the... by dmkolobov on Thursday October 03, 2024 @03:52PM (#41734283)
A bunch of startups losing out on domains they bought despite best practices is not an event I would call “detrimental to the smooth operation of the global DNS network”.

This was a known and willfully ignored business risk for these places.

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