Fedia Discussions @fedia.io jerry @fedia.io 1w ago

.io TLD going away?

I just saw this: https://every.to/p/the-disappearance-of-an-internet-domain

I have no idea if it's real, but if it is, that will be most unfortunate

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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
The Kbin/Mbin curses continue
- 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.
  
  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)
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.

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