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.io domains will disappear (and TLD's are broken)

Internet domain names with a .io extension will cease to exist. It may take several years however. The reason: although they are heavily used by the tech industry, .io is a country code top-level domain (ccTLD), attributed to the Chagos Islands a.k.a. the British Indian Ocean Territory. The islands should return to Mauritius after a treaty with Great Britain is signed, and the territory shall cease to exist. It will therefore be removed from the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 specifications. Then, the IANA will retire existing domains as per their rules.

Though times for many tech companies: github.io, itch.io, codepen.io…​

This is a good time to remember that top-level domains are broken in may ways:

  1. The residency requirements for some country-code TLD’s are discriminatory. A multinational is able to create a legal entity in a target country in order to gain access to a domain name with no sweat. It would be extremely difficult for small companies and individuals to achieve the same goal however.

  2. The availability of certain TLD’s with certain registrars but not with others is somewhat opaque and makes things complicated, for instance if you would prefer to store all your domain names in one place.

  3. Country-code TLD’s are a dubious concept. For instance, plenty of .be websites are operated by foreign companies, giving you the illusion that they are owned by a local company. It gives you no guarantee on the actual location of the webiste owner.

  4. And they have been grossly misappropriated. The .io is an obvious example but there are others: notion.so and youtu.be come to mind.

  5. Prices are a joke, ranging from a few dollars per year to hundreds or more.

  6. All non country-code TLD’s are arbitrary and many are ridiculous.

  7. Confusion and cybersquatting are made easy: .co vs .com (but one might argue that this would be true without TLD’s).

But we are probably stuck with this broken system.