.io is a country-code TLD that uses Afilias as a backend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io That a bunch of startups and smal

.io is a country-code TLD that uses Afilias as a backend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io That a bunch of startups and small companies use a trendy .io suffix to their domain is entirely by the grace of the British Indian Ocean Territory's permissiveness on the matter. CC-tlds are owned by their affiliated sovereign nation.