Message to all organizations that use .io domain names, of which there are currently an estimated 1.6 million: A move announced last week by the new L

Is the .io top level domain headed for extinction?

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2024-10-09 13:30:03

Message to all organizations that use .io domain names, of which there are currently an estimated 1.6 million: A move announced last week by the new Labour government in the UK could mean you may have to eventually replace that ccTLD (Country Code Top Level Domain).

As reported by the BBC, the UK is “giving up sovereignty of a remote but strategically important cluster of islands in the Indian Ocean.” Under the terms of the deal, it will “hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in a historic move.”

While the move certainly has political implications in that a US-UK military base located on Diego Garcia, the largest island in the region, will remain in operation, it may also result in the elimination of the .io domain for one simple reason — the region it represents will no longer exist.

The domain name regulatory environment works as follows: the ISO 3166 standard is used to define a nation or region’s ccTLD and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) maintains that standard. Also involved is the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority or IANA, a standards organization that oversees global IP addresses and is an operating unit of ICANN.