this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
232 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
68305 readers
4216 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
while funny, it would cause me so many headaches either directly or indirectly that is completely cancels out
It would cause me a large number of professional headaches but I still think it’ll be funnier than that.
My company didn't jump on the .io bandwagon, so it would just be a bunch of random dead links.
So for me, it should be net funny.
One of our spinoff companies wants to act so badly like a start up and be edgy they moved everything to a .io domain. This would be icing on the cake for how cowboy they manage everything.
Yes, there is laws, IANA says that ideally in 3-5 years all the .io will be gone, like the .yu ones, they do not exist anymore.
The .su domain is still active and the Soviet Union does not exist for more than 30 years now.
yes because at the time they didn't know what to do, and gave .su to the .ru guys. For .yu it was also a little bit messy with multiple new countries wanting to control it. This is when IANA made laws to properly handle end of ccTLD like this, .yu does not exist anymore, it will be the same for .io
I doubt it. The cited precedent of .yu didn't have a ton of big international commercial interest, but .io does.
They will absolutely find a rationale to change what io means when ISO retires io. The "laws" will be tweaked, ignored, or loopholed around.
Jesus Christ this will be a major pain in the ass if it goes through... I'm really not in the mood of having to reconfigure all my self hosted services to a new domain.
Do it anyway. Having anything behind a TLD that is tied to the political control of a tiny geographic area is insanely careless
Maybe, but I had no idea this was tied to a country. I thought it was a novelty tld, like xyz and art. You know, like input/output so io.
All two letter domains are country-code domains.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Considering my instance has .io domain, I hope not
I'm surprised it's not mentioned in the article, but also complicating this situation is the Chagos refugees seeking to take control of the TLD and/or receive reparations from the current registrar.
Nooo, what will become of my beloved fedia.io?
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 .io from 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.
load more comments
(5 replies)
Still, too much money on .io to 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.
as country TLDs are primarily intended to be used by entities connected to that country
Primarily, sure, but quite a few of them get abused, check the notes column. A glaring one these days is .ai, as are youtu.be and, of course, goatse.cx.
Tuvalu make around $10 million a year- about one-sixth of their gdp- from licensing .tv.
load more comments
(3 replies)
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"
The profits gained from sales of .io domains has come under increasing scrutiny given that the UK's control over the archipelago itself is under threat.
Chagossian refugee groups (former inhabitants forcibly removed in the 1960s and 1970s) petitioning the UK government for the right of return have recently extended their grievances to the return of the .io domain as well (Chagos Refugees Group United Kingdom et al. vs. Internet Computer Bureau Limited Citation 2021).
Additionally, Mauritius is also attempting to gain control over .io by petitioning IANA for redelegation (Bowcott Citation 2022).
However, while these groups fight for control over the .io domain, a recent UN ruling challenging British sovereignty over the island threatens the existence of the ccTLD itself.
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.
international laws that can’t be broken.
You sweet summer child...
.io is 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.
"They have to get rid of it unless they decide not to."
I assume it's just gonna be inherited by Mauritius.
For anyone who is not familiar, your day would surely be improved by watching the Map Men video on this topic.
load more comments
(1 replies)
RIP my @tuta.io email address lmao
RIP itch.io
Really not looking forward to the idea of github.io links all becoming dead. So many repos with documentation at a github.io URL, with those links spread all across plaintext files and Stack Overflow and forums
TLDR: no
Interesting to see how no one bothered to read the article.
Real TL;DR: Maybe.
History tells us YES. Money tells us NO.
The article said companies profit from it, so their prediction is no. It’s just an opinion, and not supported by any legal or diplomatic action in the article.
My opinion is it should cease to exist. Two letter domains are country codes and IANA policy is it should match a list maintained by the UN. IANA has no business deciding for itself and has said it doesn’t want to, and they’re opening themselves to all sorts of liability and complications should they stray from that. If the UN no longer says its a valid country, it needs to no longer be a country code domain, and that’s too bad for any companies speculating on its future
Why not just let people have whatever suffix they want?
They do, that’s why this is an issue in the first place. The purpose of ccTLDs is to host domains associated with a particular country. If the country stops existing, there’s no reason to use that country’s ccTLD. The problem is they let anyone register domains under this ccTLD even if they have no association with that country, hence the situation we’re in.
Some amount of organization is a good thing for many reasons. Think of an analogy to roads where basic traffic rules allow everyone the freedom to travel wherever and however but subject to the rules of locales. Feel free to pick your own domain within any generally recognized top level domain, according to the rules established by that tld.
In particular, two character top level domains are reserved for ownership by specific countries. They get to say who can have a presence there, under what standards, and they deserve any profit made from that. This was a way of giving everyone a voice, to expand it beyond the us, to give many interests their own home
fight for chagossian self-rule so that we can keep having .io addresses
view more: next ›