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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

By that argument you should also stop using:

.org, .ngo, .lgbt, .asia, .aero, .info, .mobi, .pro, , .MN (Mongolia), .AG (Antigua and Barbuda), .BM (Bermuda), .BZ (Belize), .GI (Gibraltar), .IN (India), .ME (Montenegro), .SC (the Seychelles), and .VC (St. Vincent and the Grenadines), .SG (Singapore) and .HN (Honduras) and more

All are provided or supported by Afilias, the company running .IO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afilias

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Author here: the post is based on my direct experience with .io. It is not very clear to me how Afilias is involved in the operational side of things, AFAIK they might have just acquired the existing .io infrastructure and kept it as it is (and same goes for the way more reliable .org TLD)

This is a blogpost by Planio about moving from .io to .com

https://plan.io/blog/post/166816338743/moving-from-planio-to...

Going to planio.com redirects to plan.io, so whatever they had to say about moving from .io to .com can't be worth reading.

I was curious -- it's actually worth reading.

"We have therefore decided to match what we paid for .io domains in the past with donations to the Chagos Conservation Trust and the UK Chagos Support Association. We will continue to do so every year - as long as we will have our .io domain (or the Chagossians start receiving their fair share of the domain business)."

I don't fault them for keeping their .io considering the downsides of not doing so.

> Using .io is unfair to the Chagossian People

> The reason closest to our hearts is the geopolitical background of .io domains which we only learned about recently.

Later in the article:

> Of course, we will make sure to redirect all traffic from *.plan.io appropriately so no existing links will break in the future.

Which to me sounds like they will keep paying for the .io domain for the foreseeable future.

"I don't like conflict diamonds, but since I have a bunch I might as well keep them — I just won't wear them."

That's how it comes off to me.

If you already have a conflict diamond you already funded the mining effort. Keeping or throwing it away has no effect.

The .io registry transitioned management of the registry operations to Afilias in June of this year. They did not keep the existing infrastructure - it was migrated to Afilias systems.

That's interesting. Can you share the source of that information? I was trying to understand that but somehow I did not manage to find anything online.

I own a .io registrar and I had to make changes to migrate to the new system

dig io. SOA

dig afilias-nst.info MX

I can't find an obvious source on Afilias running .IO? nic.io doesn't link to it, Afilias doesn't list .io on their homepage as one of "their" TLDs, ...

EDIT: Google finds some announcements where registrars tell their customers about a switchover of the registry backend to Afilias June 10th, 2017. Wonder if they run the DNS or not? The nameservers are in IP space owned by ICB, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.

.IO is historically terrible and seem to have no idea what they are doing. Being it downtime, security or general DNS policy.

FWIW a glance at that wikipedia page does not show any references to the .IO TLD.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io .IO TLD is run by Internet Computer Bureau - are they the same/related companies?

https://www.internetnews.me/2017/04/12/afilias-wins-contract...

I wonder if that's in effect yet ?

They aren't running it yet. It is not being offered to registrars yet.

Should it be expected that things will improve once the transition happens, then?

nic.io contact page links to https://www.icb.co.uk/ which is not reachable

I have pingdom monitors on my .io domains, to my memory and according to Pingdom there was only one extended outage (Sept 20th) due to domain DNS. I'm growing so weary of people (mostly a developer complex) complaining about everything and expecting perfection from technology products or even worse open source projects.

Their point was to not run mission-critical API traffic on those domains, which seems reasonable.

It's not an all-or-nothing proposition. Some TLDs are more flaky. Some aren't. There's a whole continuum there, with good TLDs on top and bad TLDs at the bottom. Make your own decision based on this information.

Currently there is one blog post about an outage and a lot of speculation. I don't think there's enough information to make an "informed" decision. On the other hand, if you use .com, and the whole thing breaks, that from a users perspective means "the internet just broke", so your small startup won't be at the top of the list of sites people will complain about.

There's been like three IO outages and plus one user registered the nameserver domains to intercept traffic.

That makes it sound a lot more malicious than it actually is. Said user is an ex-Googler, did it to see if he could, went "oh shit" and immediately started serving SERVFAIL on it so other nameservers would be used. His intention wasn't to intercept traffic.

We were not the only ones affected by the outage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15293578

It was my understanding that Afilias purchased .io and kept using the existing infrastructure. I believe they have gotten many TLDs through acquisitions so I'm not sure you can compare all of them fairly.

no, they do not use the same infrastructure - it was migrated to Afilias. I own a .io registrar and I went through the migration process in June

my .me domain is my primary domain and won't expire for 10 years.

Also I've never observed an outage for it like this.

you sure about that? the Wikipedia page on Afilias doens't list IO as one of their domains, and the Wikipedia page on .io says tje 'Internet Computer Bureau' runs it, with them also running the .sh and .ac domains.

Yes it was transferred from icb to affilias in July

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