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What will happen to itch.io when the British get rid of their overseas Indian Ocean territory? Can they keep the .io Top Level Domain?
Once the treaty is signed, the .io cctld will phase out over 5 years.
Unless ICANN get greedy and grant an exemption.
for once I hope that you do get greedy
Could Mauritius choose to keep .io? The income it would bring in would probably be bigger than their GDP.
Yes. That's not what the regulation says, but exceptions are made all the time.
Nope. They already have .mu
Yeah but they UK has like 5 other domains besides .io
ccTLDs are based on the ISO two letter country codes - it's deferring the responsibility for cleaning up the British mess to ISO
But why did the Indian ocean territories ever have an ISO country code, they were never a country? It doesn't make sense that a territory should lose its TLD just cause it changes countries.
Half grandfathered in from a period when UK was a commonwealth, and ANZAC were not technically independent.
ISO-3166-1 has a lot of "countries" that aren't actually independent - but useful to have codes for because they are geographically distinct.
Couldn't they just move .io to a different category? Or are TLDs never reused once they lose their original designation?
Couldn't they just move .io to a different category?
Specifically the issue is that two letter TLDs are reserved exclusively for countries/governments. So far only one exception has been made to this rule, .su for the Soviet Union. So another exemption is certainly possible.
As I understand it, the .su was not really an intentional exception as much as it happened before the strict rules were written down.
.su isn't an exception. The rule was created so the .su situation doesn't happen again.
It is weird to imagine a world in which glasnost kept the union together and we have active .su domains around. I imagine they'd be less suspicious than .ru in our timeline but not a lot less
2 Letter TLDs are always country codes (and ccTLDs are always 2 Letters long). So moving them to another category is technically possible, but unprecedented and improbable.
They’re not just country codes, but match a list of two character country codes defined by the UN
Well Russia still kept .su after the USSR dissolved, so why not? It's a convenient source of income.