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As far as I can find .su is the exception in surviving, not the rule, and who operated the ccTLD is irrelevant to the question of whether ICANN decides to allow
by lolinder 2y ago
As far as I can find .su is the exception in surviving, not the rule, and who operated the ccTLD is irrelevant to the question of whether ICANN decides to allow it to live on.
It does seem likely that ICANN won't kill off all existing registrations, but this is supposition, not an answer. If we look only at what they've done historically to ccTLDs the most likely outcome is that new registrations become locked and ICANN attempts to phase the .io TLD out.
They may break that trend now given how much they've already polluted the TLD space, but they may not, and I think your comment is a bit too optimistic. People with .io domains should absolutely be paying close attention here.
Edit: gnfargbl found the actual written policy [0].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41730559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41730559
- margalabargala 2y agoI can't be the only person who read this and was curious about what other ccTLDs have existed and have since been removed, so here's the list of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain#Historical_ccTLDs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain#... There was also a .um for US minor outlying islands, removed in 2008.
- the_mitsuhiko 2y agoThat's not entirely true. .su is an exceptional reservation but it's not the only one with a tld. For instance ".uk" exists and ".ac" exists. It's absolutely possible that someone will asking for an exceptional reservation for IO at ISO and it can be kept alive forever.
- lolinder 2y ago> It's absolutely possible that someone will asking for an exceptional reservation for IO at ISO and it can be kept alive forever. I agree it's possible, I disagree with OP that it's a foregone conclusion. At this point if I were the owner of a .io domain I would treat that as the unlikely best case scenario and start looking at what domain I'd fall back to if ICANN sticks to their rules.
- mywittyname 2y agoI mean, the TLD .pizza exists, so could .io move to the same mechanism that allows those to exist? Or is it something like 2-3 character TLDs are reserved for country codes?
- mintplant 2y agoTwo-character TLDs are reserved for country codes, yes.
- lolinder 2y agoTwo character TLDs are reserved for country codes, and they're meant to reflect a very specific ISO-standardized list of country codes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2 Breaking with ISO 3166-1 comes with the risk that a new ISO-standardized country cannot claim its TLD. So in order to reclaim the TLD as generic, startups dont just have to persuade ICANN, they have to make the case to ISO that IO is a significant enough code that it should be an "exceptional reservation" like UK, UN, EU, and SU.
- saaaaaam 2y ago.pizza is a gTLD (generic top level domain) rather than a ccTLD (country code top level domain). ICANN rules say that gTLDs have to have three characters or more. So you can have .xyz but not .xo
- magicalhippo 2y agoPerhaps naive question: why can't they simply convert it from a ccTLD to a gTLD?
- lolinder 2y agoTwo-letter domains are defined to be ccTLDs—if it's two letters, it's a country code domain. Breaking that rule would risk leaving a future ISO-standardized country unable to claim its domain because its code was already assigned to a tech startup gTLD.
- jowea 2y agoWould a future ISO-standardized country get assigned a code that collides with an historical code?
- Dibby053 2y agoThe short-lived country of Serbia and Montenegro got assigned .cs (from Crna Gora - Srbija) which previously belonged to Czechoslovakia, but it seems it was never used (they kept using .yu). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.cs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.cs
- mr_toad 2y agoReusing country codes seems like it would annoy a lot of DBAs, not just people involved with the domain name system.
- kjs3 2y agoI've heard it discussed as a possibility tho I don't personally know how the ISO CC assignment process works. On the other hand, we don't exactly create new countries at a rate that exhausting 26^2 combinations should be an issue, but I suppose that could change.
- chrismorgan 2y ago
- not2b 2y agoThey might just change its status to a vanity top level domain like ".lol" or ".sucks" and sell it to the highest bidder, taking the money. They would justify it by saying that they want to promote stability, maybe require that the new owner honor the domains at least until they expire and then charge what they want. That seems to be the way ICANN works these days.
- dogma1138 2y agoIt doesn’t matter really what ICANN decides if the registrars ignore it.
- crote 2y agoAnd it doesn't matter what the registrars choose to do when the entire ".io" TLD gets kicked out of the root name servers - who in turn are following the official zone file as published by ICANN. Accepting registrations for a domain is pretty useless when those domains aren't going to resolve to anything.
- alexchamberlain 2y agoBut do the root name servers _have_ to respect the ICANN zone file?
- notatoad 2y agoat least one of the root name servers is hosted by ICANN, so there's essentially zero chance that all of the roots will choose to disrgard the ICANN zone file.
- dogma1138 2y agoIf an ICANN decision would be seen as detrimental to the smooth operation of the global DNS network yes there is, their server would simply be quarantined yes it would be a problem since root servers are “hardcoded” in many places but for the most part all the major DNS services can continue to operate without them for a while at least.
- dmkolobov 2y agoA bunch of startups losing out on domains they bought despite best practices is not an event I would call “detrimental to the smooth operation of the global DNS network”. This was a known and willfully ignored business risk for these places.