The .io domain was originally run by a guy who didn’t really have the UK’s official backing. He was basically just depositing money into the accounts of differe

The .io domain was originally run by a guy who didn’t really have the UK’s official backing. He was basically just depositing money into the accounts of different overseas territories for the domains he was selling, and they seemed to be fine with it. Eventually, he sold it off, and now a hedge fund owns it. The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) will eventually stop existing, which means its ISO country code would go away too. But domain names tied to countries have outlasted countries before—like .su from the old USSR. IANA would likely prioritize keeping all the existing .io domains working over worrying about whether the country behind it still exists. Google already treats .io more like a generic top-level domain (gTLD), similar to .nu, .to, or .tv, since most of the sites using it have a global audience, not just people from the small island it’s technically tied to.