It's possible that the .io cctld is going to go away [0]. Does crates.io have a backup plan at all? Does anyone know what problems it would end up causing?

I imagine the package registry having to move domains is going to cause a ton of problems.

Frankly, it's concerning to me that so much of the Rust ecosystem has chosen to standardize on shaky ccTLDs. The Indian Ocean Territory (.io) is a small island territory whose only inhabitants are a single military base, it is crazy to use that domain for something important. Serbia (.rs) is more stable, but they could still cut off access for non-Serbians if they wanted to.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io#Phasing_Out

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[–] BatmanAoD 8 points 1 month ago (10 children)

Obviously this isn't specific to Rust, but frankly it's bizarre to me that ICANN chose to tie top-level domains to country codes in the first place. Languages might have made sense, but a major feature of the internet is that it's less beholden to political boundaries than most of the physical world is.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (6 children)

It's more bizarre that a single organisation would have such tight control over the Internet. Assigning a tld to each country is a good way to appease each country and give them autonomy over their own portion

[–] BatmanAoD 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

But do they actually have autonomy, give that random companies can use .io and .ai? Or did the British Indian Ocean Territory and Anguilla approve all such uses of those domains?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

There are several cctld where the entity buying the domain needs to be a local. EU is an example for that. De requires you to be able appoint a representative within 2 weeks living in Germany.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yep. The governments typically select who administers the tld and then get a lump sum or portion of the revenues.

For .ai it was 10% of their GDP in 2023 which is insane...

The registration fees earned from the .ai domains go to the treasury of Government of Anguilla. As per a New York Times report, in 2018, the total revenue generated out of selling .ai domains was $2.9 million.[13][14]

In 2023, Anguilla’s government made about US$32 million from fees collected for registering .ai domains. That amounted to more than 10% of gross domestic product for the territory.[

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ai

[–] BatmanAoD 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Wow, I definitely should have google that myself before asking, but thank you for explaining and calling out that data point.

I honestly think that shows that it was in fact a bad idea to assign TLDs to countries. Having a country code acronym with a popular tech meaning is essentially just luck of the draw, so they've basically just arbitrarily given a few small countries a valuable resource to sell. I guess that benefits those countries, but I doubt "quasi-random fundraising for small countries" was ever the intent.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

They are just iso country codes though, so it is just the luck that some have become so popular.

Some countries are pretty strict that their tlds must be local or at least provide translation in the regional language. The cook islands for instance have prime opportunity with .co.ck but they refuse the to let people take advantage

[–] Strykker 1 points 1 month ago

Canada specifically won't issue .ca without proof of residence in the country, or something close to that.

I think .io is unfortunately administered by a group outside of the country it's related to. Which means they have less control at the moment (something something British colonialism or something)

But yeah imo country code tlds should be limited to businesses / people who reside within the specific country.

We have soo many other tld options that are better choices.

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