.io TLD going away?

Canard, 7 days ago

I remember the diagram tool draw.io, now diagrams.net mentioning this a few years ago, justifying their domain name change: https://www.drawio.com/blog/move-diagrams-net

Blaze, 7 days ago

The Kbin/Mbin curses continue

DarkThoughts, 6 days ago

le sigh...
Afaik jerry has a fedia.social TLD that leads to an iceshrimp instance which potentially could be a replacement if .io is indeed endangered.

jerry, 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

In the worst case scenario, fedia.io will be around for at least 5 more years (that is apparently the standard subset timeline). I have many more domain names if the worst comes, but there is a lot of expectation that the .io may somehow be saved due to the incredible amount of infrastructure built around it (GitHub.io, dockerhub.io, and of course fedia.io among many others)

Blaze, 6 days ago

That sounds good!

vaguerant, 6 days ago

It's real in the sense that the established policy is to retire ccTLDs within five years of a country code ceasing to exist. But there are multiple provisos there:

• we don't know with any certainty that the IO country code will be disestablished; it doesn't necessarily follow that Mauritius regaining control of the British Indian Ocean Territory will mean the end of the IO country code (and associated .io ccTLD), for a variety of historical and administrative reasons
• we don't know with any certainty that IANA will unequivocally shut down the domain, vs. converting it to a generic top level domain like many other existing special-interest and novelty gTLDs (e.g. .cloud, .gay, .info, .tech)

Obviously it's worth keeping an eye on what IANA does with this situation, but personally I suspect one or the other of the above will happen. It's probably in the interests of Mauritius to retain the domain as a source of income, but if they don't then somebody else will likely want to take ownership, and there's plenty of moneyed interests in retaining .io since a number of large business customers (the largest likely being Alphabet/Google) are already using it.