I doubt this will happen, but they should just reassign it to the Mauritius authority. The citizens of the islands could then potentially see some benefit from it, not Google or ICANN or whoever selflessly offers to take it over.
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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Normally that would have been the preferred solution, but since IANA has experienced all kinds of shenanigans on similar occasions they have decided to not allow ccTLD's to survive their former country anymore.
Yep. And for very good reasons, as explained in the article. But knowing that domains can be a significant source of income for a small nation, it does seem a shame to both waste that resource and break tons of sites in the process. I wish there were better ways to do this that didn't mean shutting it down or even selling it off to the highest bidder (who already has enough money).
Any sources for further reading/watching?
The article you're commenting on, for a start...
On September 19, 1990, the IANA created and delegated the top-level domain .su to the USSR. Just six weeks later, the Berlin Wall fell
wot
the Berlin Wall fell in November of 1989, something is definitely wrong with the chronology here
It was fixed and now has this comment at the bottom:
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Berlin Wall fell in 1990, not 1989. We regret the error.
Maybe they saw your comment
This is one of the main reasons why I've been a boring stick in the mud and stuck to com/net/org domain names for stuff I'm that I intend to use for anything that's going to be around for more than a short period.
Odds are they're not going to end up vanishing due to things utterly outside the control of, well, anyone or get sold to a horrible steward of them that jacks up prices insanely or does other stupid shit.
I will admit to owning a few .us domains, but as a US-ian, if the .us TLD vanished, I'm pretty sure my domain names would be very, very, very far down the list of shit I'm actually concerned about at that moment.
If the .us TLD vanished, as in, if America ceased to be. I imagine com, net, org, and domains of the like would also be seriously affected since their maintainers as well as the organization with all control over all domains and the root servers would also be affected by such change. The internet could adapt for sure even in the worst case scenario, but with how centralized DNS is it would cause more than a few shakeups. Probably would make this incident look like a drop in the bucket.
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LOL, this very article is being hosted on the '.to' country tld belonging to the Kingdom of Tonga.
Thanks to GitHub this wonderful article, that made me opt for another domain for my recent project a year ago, is now… drumroll under an .io domain too: https://tamouse.github.io/blog/politics/2019/10/02/why-is-the-io-domain-problematic.html
Irony much.
Anyone else potentially see a problem in which a single organization oversees all name usage and can arbitrarily decide to break a good majority of the internet over stupid shit like this? Or are we all just fine with a single American based entity being able to decide what domains are valid and not?
I think it's more of a historical accident that nobody really finds ideal, but there is also no good alternative solution that has a critical mass assembled behind it.
It all started with Jon Postel just taking on the job of keeping track. This is an interesting topical document: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2468
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It’s strange to me that they wouldn’t simply reassign control of it to another… erm, what’s the word?, at least for the technology-related domains.
I was wondering the same. It's a very popular TLD, so you'd think they would grandfather it in as a generic (non-country) TLD like .net or whatever.
Country code domains are decided by international agreement on two character abbreviations per country, and IANA needs to abide by that.
For example, can you imagine IANA caught In the middle of whether ‘.cn’ should be owned by China or Taiwan? What a disaster that would be. Their only sustainable approach is to stay out of it, and just follow what the UN says
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at least for the technology-related domains.
It's not a technology related domain though; it's a country's domain that happens to be used for a lot of tech.
With the country dissolving, the domain does too, so it can become available for future countries.
Wouldn’t the country and domain dissolving mean it can be reassigned? I don’t understand why after that it would still be considered a country TLD only available for future countries.
Because 2 letter tlds are reserved to be issued to countries. Ideally the country's 2 letter country code.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain
All ASCII ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all two-letter top-level domains are ccTLDs.
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This is about .io being a country code and that country ceasing to exist, so .io will be retired. I say who the fuck cares, release the ~~kracken~~ .io.
The fact that an insane number of sites use it makes it a big deal. If it dies, there will be plenty of dead links
By "release the ~~kracken~~ .io" I'm saying make it open for general use that is not country specific. We already have tons of domains, I see no reason why this has to be retired.
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Tangentially related, but I love how http://ai is an actual website that you can visit. We're so used to thinking of websites as <something>.<tld> that it's really weird to see a website hosted directly on a top level domain with no subdomain.
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This is just yet another "fuck you" to the Chagossians, for whom it could have been the next best thing to reparations if they were given control of it.
But ambiguity is the worst thing for a top-level domain. Unknowingly, this decision created an environment in which .su became a digital wild west. Today, it is a barely policed top-level domain, a plausibly deniable home for Russian dark ops and a place where supremacist content and cyber-crime have found cover.
So much drama.
"Supremacist content", "dark ops", "cyber-crime".
"The free world" has recently equated itself to Hitler at least two more times, and somebody's worried that there are places with less censorship.
Also my anecdotal experience with .su domains is better than with .ru domains.
I guess by "cybercrime" they mean piracy, because that's the main thing I've seen .su used for.
Well, the main thing I've seen it used for are old homepages and hobbyist sites with web design from year 1997.
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Come to think of it, I only know two .su domains and they're pretty great...
Let me introduce you to a third one ↑
I don't know any but I'm now of the opinion that they should be reassigned to Superman.
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In a way, I understand, .yu was removed years ago for instance. Here it is because .io is pretty special for geek and all
Counterpoint: .su still exists
So the .su domain was handed to Russia to operate alongside its own (.ru). The Russian government agreed that it would eventually be shut down, but no clear rules around its governance or when that should happen were defined.
But ambiguity is the worst thing for a top-level domain. Unknowingly, this decision created an environment in which .su became a digital wild west. Today, it is a barely policed top-level domain, a plausibly deniable home for Russian dark ops and a place where supremacist content and cyber-crime have found cover.
I seems IANA would like to not repeat past mistakes.
Yes but it's unregulated and like most unregulated TLDs it has become a cesspool of malware and dark dealings. I don't think anybody would never if that were to happen to .io.
As much as I understand that some tiny countries need every source of income they can get, I still firmly believe that regional TLDs should only get to be used by users relevant to that region. Or else they just have no meaning at all.
That was my mini rant. Thanks for attending. That is all.
at the same time they're allowing any tld to who's willing to fork $100k per year. So just sell the management of the tld
Not any, this is a 2-letter TLD
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I think .io will continue to exist as a generic tld
ICANN specifically set aside all two character TLDs to be for country specific codes. There's only a few cases where they kept ex countries TLDs around and phased them out over several years. It would be an entirely new precedent if they did keep it. So I wouldn't depend on it
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Someone please delete .cx
Delete .gov and .com, blights upon's the digital common
Yeah, and this, right here, is a huge reason why I don't buy vanity domains based on country codes. Political structures can change quickly, and I really don't want to have to rebrand something just because some country decides it wants to restrict its country-code TLDs (e.g. the .ml TLD is owned by Mali, and they could totally push to restrict it to Malian residents).
I stick with the normal ones, like .com, .info, or .org, or content-specific ones like .games.
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