Folks, IANA have not said anything about .io, and until they do - don't believe anything that tries to make any bold claims.
".io is going away" - not until the actual authority who can make that decision says so, and so far they've said *nothing*.
@ecn@mastodon.social wait what is happening?
@tessarakt @4censord @ecn The base at Diego Garcia, and possibly the whole island, will be leased by the UK from Mauritius for 99 years, so yeah, BIOT and .io will probably survive.
@4censord the British Indian Ocean territory that .io technically covers is going to cease to exist because the UK is handing back the Chagos islands to Mauritius. So now nobody really has a clear picture of what's going to happen to .io domains in the process.
@ecn To a large extent these days IANA don’t really decide whether a ccTLD lives or dies. They don’t want to be in that position; they don’t want to be political.
So they’ve bound themselves to a policy: permanent allocations in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 only. If something becomes transitionally reserved (i.e. the country ceases existing), you get a 5 year sunset period.
@erincandescent @ecn the local people should get all the profit from the .io tld
@gkrnours
They were *already* supposed to be, but, as you know, british colonialism
@erincandescent @ecn
@erincandescent @ecn unfortunately it hasn't entirely played out like that. .su continues to exist and the EU bullied them for years to get .eu
@erincandescent @ecn I suspect IANA will follow their actual policy, in which case the TLD would be shut down no later than 10 years after IO is removed from ISO3166-1, though more likely after 5 years.
I doubt we'll hear anything from IANA until after ISO 3166/MA makes a statement
@artemist @erincandescent @ecn nic.su enters the chat
@aredridel @erincandescent @ecn I think .su happened because they did not have a policy at the time, and they do not want a repeat of "domain that's officially supposed to be sunset, but no work is happening towards that"
@artemist @aredridel @ecn also SU is weird in that its still “Exceptionally Reserved” in ISO 3166-1 (which is the same state as EU, for example)
@erincandescent @ecn it's kind of funny that no one wants to deal with "who is a country", so IANA has delegated their decisions to ISO 3166/MA, who has in turn effectively delegated their decisions to the United Nations
@ecn ya i mean .su is still around and i'm sure .io has far more usage
@ecn @0xabad1dea Sorry, you are not a what?
(It’s a joke because I first read IANA as IANAL: I am not a lawyer.)
@ecn I will make a bold claim: make backups and run a test scenario if .io was to disappear overnight.
@ecn "Saying nothing" is also the same as "not going away, for now", right?
@ecn Honestly I would be unsurprised if the company behind running .io right now didn't petition to have it converted from a ccTLD to a gTLD instead of sunsetting it.
@ecn It should be noted that .su still exists and is taking new registrations despite the fact that the Soviet Union was removed from ISO 3166 over thirty years ago.
@ecn they're dissolving the entire BIOT? Not just reducing the size to Diego Garcia?
@ecn is there already a new BIOT Constitution Order?