Serious TLDs

A year ago I wrote about silly TLDs, but this morning I learned about a more serious side to TLDs when I read Paul Butler’s tweet about the possible forced retirement of all .io domains.

TL;DR: .io is a ccTLD—country code top-level domain—managed by the UK, tied to its territory in the Indian Ocean. The UK is giving up that territory, which means the “IO” country code will go away, which means the .io TLD might go away.

The full article Paul linked to, hosted on a Tongan-controlled .to domain (as noted by Can Duruk), is fascinating.

ISO and IANA

The same ISO that maintains the ISO 8601 date and time standard also manages country codes. IANA, another standards body (under the ICANN umbrella), uses those codes for TLDs. From the article:

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.

And IANA has good reason for having a precise standard. Two geopolitical events in the 1990s led to TLD drama: first with .su when the USSR dissolved, and second with .yu when Yugoslavia split, which included a literal domain heist by Slovenian academics at the University of Belgrade in Serbia.

What about Anguilla

Anguilla’s ownership of the .ai TLD has received lots of press attention over the past few years, but unlike .io it appears relatively safe. Paul pointed out that .ai looks to be in credible hands with Vince Cate, so AI startups can probably sleep soundly.