What happens when a ccTLD is retired? Exploring the potential risks of .io | Hacker News Reader

What happens when a ccTLD is retired? Exploring the potential risks of .io

salt.agency

111 pointsrezamoaiandin97 comments

A nice, spammy scare piece. The bit about the UK somehow losing its permanent seat on the UN Security Council over Diego Garcia was a wee bit off. The UN’s charter would have to be changed to change the permanent members of the Security Council. Those same permanent members can veto any such proposed change. They can’t be forced out without rupturing things to the point of just creating a separate UN 2.0 excluding the UK and probably the USA too.

Bafflingly absurd to suggest a permanent seat at the council could be forfeit over such a matter. These seats are occupied by the victors of the last world war, and will continue to be so until the results of the next one.

I wouldn’t be so sure about that. The League of Nations failed, and then disbanded. The UN fails constantly, but has decided to simply become more irrelevant overtime rather than disbanding. I can’t see why a fresh world war would convince them to change tack.

The League of Nations was created by the winners of WWI and disbanded by the events of WWIIz exactly as parent wrote.

The League of Nations was disbanded because it was entirely ineffective at achieving what it had set out to do, as was evident from the outbreak of WWII. The UN had the same goals as the LoN, and has been equally ineffective at achieving them. It has failed to prevent a single war, it has failed to prevent a single genocide, it has failed to resolve a single territorial dispute, and has not had a single successful peacekeeping mission (and given the human rights abuse committed by UN peacekeepers, there’s a compelling case that the peacekeeping mission as a whole has caused more harm than good). Those are the primary reasons that both of those organisations were founded, not as a winners club of the previous world war. The argument for why the LoN was disbanded also applies to the UN, but to an even greater extent. The only difference being that the UN has chosen to continue existing, in a state of total irrelevance. Given the 75 year track record, I see no reason to believe that failing to prevent yet another war would somehow become the tipping point for this organisation.

The League of Nations failed because it was structurally somewhat broken, and the nations that championed its creation failed to use it to effectively wield power to prevent the next war (See Wilsons failure to get the treaty creating/joining the League ratified by the US Senate). The UN fixed the first part, and provided current trends continue, we continue to remember the lesson from the second part. While it is arguable that some sort of conflict was deigned to happen because of the inequities inherent to the Treat of Versailles, a worldwide war was not even the obvious conclusion from that.

The UN and the LoN have exactly the same set of fundamental problems. Neither of those organisations had the power to do anything at all. If they don’t have the power to enforce their decisions, then they’re useless, if they do have the power to enforce their decisions, then national sovereignty ceases to exist. Which is why the UN or any organisation that succeeds it will always be irrelevant. How exactly do you think war has occurred in the post WWII world? Only in one of two ways. Either the instigator doesn’t care what the UN thinks, so they start their war, or they have to be seen to care what the UN thinks, so they ask first, the UN says no, and they start their war anyway. The security council is supposedly a mechanism for checks and balances, but all it really does it make sure that somebody is going to have an interest in vetoing any significant decision. Further cementing it’s irrelevance. The UN has demonstrably failed to prevent even a single war or genocide since its inception, yet it continues to exist. On what basis do you think failing to prevent war is eventually going to lead to its demise? The primary function the UN serves is as a forum for its 193 member states to each pitch a soapbox. It has never been a place that countries rely on to resolve disputes. The only real existential threat it faces is if the tax payers in those 193 countries get sick of paying for it.

While that might be true for US, UK and Russia, I fail to see how China and France won WW2.

Major powers on the winning side that didn’t finish the war as Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.

Beware the overwhelming Eurocentrism of WWII history as well, China was heavily involved throughout the duration of the conflict and took 3-4 million military casualties with 7-8 civilian casualties in the Pacific theater of WWII, second only to Russia (ignoring the losers).

Germany had a war goal of occupying europe. France wasn't occupied at the end of the war, therefore france won.

Same applied to japan and china.

Their example of an “unsuccessful domain migration” is Gander Mountain.

The drop in traffic might have been a result of the fact that they liquidated all of their US stores...

While that might be true, UK might renounce its rights if the pressure is very high.

I doubt .io will disappear. .su is still running decades after the fall of the USSR.

well, fuck.yu became fuck.me

For context .yu was the ccTLD for Yugoslavia, and .me is the ccTLD for Montenegro, which is one of the states formerly part of Yugoslavia before its dissolution.

How many .yu domains were registered when Yugoslavia broke up? Back in 1992 most people had never even heard of the Internet, especially in politically unstable third world countries. You could probably count the number of .yu domains registered on your hands.

By virtue of being a former Soviet satellite, .yu was second-world, not third-world.

Yugoslavia was communist but no Soviet satellite... See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito%E2%80%93Stalin_split

In fact it was a founding member of the non-aligned movement which came to be called third world.

There is some doubt in that. Many suspect it was just a facade to trick the West.

The "Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" (FRY) existed until 2003, when it was renamed to "Serbia and Montenegro", which split into separate countries of "Serbia" and "Montenegro" in 2006. "Serbia and Montenegro" was still using the .yu ccTLD until 2006.

.yu was retired in 2010. Still seeing some old outdoor ads with it here in Montenegro.

>Back in 1992 most people had never even heard of the Internet, especially in politically unstable third world countries.

I never remember Yugoslavia as being a third world country. Purchasing power wasn't as high as in US but it certainly wasn't third world level and no people died of hunger, or because they did not afford health care. Also, housing was affordable.

> fuck.me is a

> premium domain name

> ...but it could be yours!

Aye, any attempt at retirement would quickly result in a new '.io' gTLD replacing the '.io' ccTLD. The more reasonable concern is not that the ccTLD is retired, but that registration rules and/or prices are changed.

I doubt that .io could become a gTLD, given the established practice of using ISO 3166 alpha-2 codes for country-specific domain names. A .io gTLD would be dependent on obtaining some sort of long-term reservation for IO in ISO 3166 and perhaps even in existing standards that extend it, and this is unlikely to be granted given how tight the alpha-2 encoding space is already.

They could just stop allowing new .io registrations until we begin colonizing Jupiter.

But it's run governed by ICANN, so they might bend your way if you got the $$$, and millions of it.

The gtld program requires TLDs be at least 3 characters long.

I wasn't aware of that! Well, my mistake; retirement is a real concern after all.

This article strikes as blog spam to push this companies domain migration service.

Does the current TLD system even make sense?

There is a .amazon, a .google, a .cancerresearch, a .sex, a .rich (which costs thousands of dollars btw). Plenty of them such as .io and .tv are all completely untethered from their original meanings/purposes. At this point, a website is just a string with a '.' in it somewhere.

Instead of having 1500+ discretely decided upon TLDs why not just let people just create their own TLDs as long as they have a server to host the DNS?

Because the lucky few on top of the tld chain are still making fortunes. Ironically I see the internet going back to keywords/search terms in the future (aol keywords). I hope the tld hegemony is eventually a distant memory.

Then https://www.opennic.org is for you! Welcome friend!

The .fur domain is ... interesting

That exists? It's probably all furries, then.

Exit: I totally missed the GP post. OpenNic allows any TLD to be created.

That's really cool, but none of the listed projects seem to work (e.g. grep.geek, post.uu, be.libre, opennic.chan...). Am I missing something? Do I have to do something special to access these domains?

Yes, use an OpenNiC NS too.

I have no clue how I've never heard of this - this is really cool and there should be more stuff like it. We should not be in a world where 70s era bureaucratic committees liks iana and icann get to define the internet

.rich seems like a great idea to earn shit ton of money.

https://icannwiki.org/.rich

There are only 99 registered domains, a few of which are probably owned by the registry itself.

At $2,500/yr/domain, they're not exactly making bank. The cost to maintain all of this probably eats into the profit a bit.

I'd be surprised if it even pays for itself. Running a gTLD is not intended to be cheap. $1M pa is the ballpark I've seen quoted.

Lots of people had the idea that they'd get a million customers and so even at one dollar per customer they couldn't help but make money, the reality in a lot of cases was few customers and no route out.

A handful of general purpose gTLDs work, there's one quite popular in Russia for example, using Cyrillic characters instead of Latin, they have a broad base of paying customers.

Most of the rest are pure vanity and can be expected to have similar lifespan to a vanity .com domain. Some will be sold to speculators, some will be expensively dormant for years, many will be abandoned and forgotten.

Mostly gTLDs were/ are a way for ICANN to make a lot of money exploring stupid people's greed.

>Mostly gTLDs were/ are a way for ICANN to make a lot of money exploring stupid people's greed.

In the '90s people told that buying lots of .com was a waste. And now we have domain hoarders making millions.

> the reality in a lot of cases was few customers and no route out.

I am keeping an eye on decommissioned TLDs - https://twitter.com/fanf/status/1245512707459158020?s=21

Most of them are closed .brand TLDs owned by companies whose business isn’t DNS. The struggling open TLDs seem to be traded and collected by big registries that can get economies of scale, rather than closed, so there is a limited way out. I have seen at least one .brand TLD (.bond for Bond University) converted to an open TLD and sold to a big gTLD registry provider.

That's good to know, do you have all this in some other form than Tweets?

I can see that having them as Tweets is delicious if you participate because you can just RT them with context but I'm the sort of person who likes big piles of data to contemplate at once.

That'd be a nightmare if .io got taken away. Handshake.org works to solve ICANN's TLD issue (they control the entire namespace) and charge like $185,000-250k for a gTLD

Nobody really uses opennic and it has the same issues as ICANN "a single party controls the namespace" with naming on Handshake it's verified, with no trust going to a single authority.

Handshake is a decentralized root zone file, how it should be. Check out Handshake.org (uses a coin to prevent sybil attacks) Namebase.io to bid on TLDS Nextdns.io (enable handshake) in the options Some good guides and a video here: https://dns.live/start.html

Works on top of regular DNS and supports top 100k alexa domains to prevent abuse/theft

I just bought a few TLDs DNS Live offers free hosting etc (ns/web) if you get a tld off of Namebase.io

Sorry if I seem a little biased. A cool thing to play with though. The internet naming system should be way better especially with whatever this corrupt .org sale is to some illuminati Ethos Capital, ICANN selling .org to themselves? lol

California just halted the .org sale in the spirit of an open and free internet. ICANN has too much power, and would have made over a billion on the .org sale.

>(uses a coin to prevent sybil attacks)

Hurray. So it solves the actual issue of the people who makes fortunes from the DNS system not being the nice people behind that coin.

Indeed.

Isn't this just an other example of how dangerous it is to base your business on third party resources?

>Instead of having 1500+ discretely decided upon TLDs why not just let people just create their own TLDs as long as they have a server to host the DNS

How would that fix anything?

The problem is the actual hierarchical DNS system, not who gets to own a tld.

it's too strategic for the UK to want to give up and there's no mechanism to force it to do, so there's no particular reason to be worried that it will

similarly the linked Guardian article makes a fuss about the UK's security council seat, which again, the UK will never give up, and again, there's no mechanism to remove it

More importantly, the whole reason that the UK owns the islands, and the reason it evicted the Chagossians, was because the United States wanted them to. The UK will not lose its place on the UNSC for doing the bidding of the US. The UK likewise will not give up its territory because they would much rather piss off the ICJ than the US. The islands are a UK colony only in name; they are a US colony in reality.

I feel bad for the Chagossians. I think they should be compensated much better and allowed to return home. But the relinquishment of Diego Garcia is not happening, and the argument that an archipelago over 2000 kilometers away is an "integral part" of Mauritius is clearly motivated reasoning.

Given how little care is given to the Marshallese in the US, where we literally nuked their islands out of existence, I can't imagine anyone's going to care about BIOT any time soon.

The US didn't "literally" nuke their islands out of existence. It did, however, render most all of it unsafe for inhabitation.

What do you call what Ivy Mike did to Elugelab?

I imagine Soviet leaders were jealous. US destroyed other people's islands while they had to destroy their own in the Arctic Ocean.

> The UK will not lose its place on the UNSC for doing the bidding of the US.

Predicated on the US still being involved in the UN though? Which I wouldn't rate as a certainty any more - they were ignoring the fees for years and now there's an active "NIH" Government determined to pull out of every cooperative endeavour...

It seems that there is an easy solution here that is being overlooked.

Allow any country to nominate their ccTLD for conversion to gTLD, and make that automatic when a country dissolves.

Hold an auction for the gTLD for anyone who qualifies under the existing gTLD rules, and the highest bidder gets to run the gTLD. The proceeds of the auction go to the country that owned the ccTLD.

A lot of small countries would probably gladly put up their ccTLDs for auction for the one time cash infusion, and in cases like this, if the country does get turned back over, the acquiring country would probably be glad to have the money.

This solution seems like an everyone wins scenario. The TLD continues to exist and some government gets a small cash infusion.

I'm not sure everybody wins. What happens if a malicious country buys the tld and then appropriates the domains and/or redirects traffic?

The gTLD transfer rules already supposedly prevent this. But this is a risk with the transfer of any gTLD.

What's the difference between this and the current situation where countries can also sell or lease their ccTLD to the highest bidder? Are the gTLD registrars held to stricter standards when it comes to continuity of service?

It's functionally the same but removes government control for a one time cash infusion, so it makes the incentives a bit different.

Really? I'm not so sure about that. Many countries make a lot of money just renting their ccTLD out.

Sure many would probably do it but I don't think it's

1) good, it's nice that we have eg gov.uk Even if you don't live in the UK.

2) Economically beneficial to most countries that would elect to do it in the long term.

For the countries that derive benefit from the current arrangement, they would just maintain the status quo. But this gives an option to existing countries who need a cash infusion now, as well as a streamlined process for dealing with countries that no longer exist.

This works until the BIOT becomes part of Mauritius and the eastern part of Ohio declare sovereignty under the name Inner Ohio and get the ISO code IO :)

Presumably the entire point of this is that if Mauritius no longer wanted to run the .io domain it would automatically go up for auction.

Also, you can't reuse ccTLDs.

I won't be surprised if there is a Free Ohio movement in some obscure corners of the Internet with its members all different personalities of its glorious leader.

I think the .su TLD shows what happens, i.e. not much

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.su

.yu ccTLD shows what else can happen, i.e. domains of ex-countries can be killed off.

This whole thing kinda makes me nervous for using a .in and not being from India.

Is India in danger of being made an ex-country like Yugoslavia?

More in general, is ccTLD selection a form of bet on the continued existence of a country? Can we sell TLD insurance? TLD swaps?

More worried about them clamping down on non Indian people using it.

Why? There are no restrictions on using .in domains.

And, in the 1990s, .cs for Czechoslovakia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.cs

Tell that to the .ly’s

Let me get this straight... people whose businesses rely on the existence of the .io TLD are donating to a campaign group that wants the TLD's raison d'être to be abolished? Smart.

I mean, consider a hypothetical. Let's say there's a whole swathe of businesses that have no connection to the American South, but for whatever hipster reasons occurred briefly in their subculture, all have brand logos that feature the confederate flag. At some point, someone points out that this flag represents the fight to defend slavery and lots of African-Americans and their supporters are still very upset that justice has not been done. Do the hipster business owners say to themselves: oh dear, I don't like this ugly historical incident that is indicated by a significant part of our branding, and neither do my customers more to that matter, so I'd better stop using that flag and rebrand to something else? Or do they say, actually I think the flag is really pretty and it makes my organisation look modern and cool, so how about I assuage my guilt by donating to a support group that just happens to be also campaigning for the abolition of that flag that I want to continue to use?

If you don't think the BIOT should exist, don't stake your business on its continuing existence. And good luck invading Diego Garcia, it's much more heavily defended than the Falklands were.

Actually, let's not consider that hypothetical.

Let's consider the actual scenario, in which .io and the BIOT are thoroughly divorced in the minds of basically everyone.

In that case, someone with a .io domain might well want to separate the two-letter string from its problematic origins. It's just two letters, after all, and this is the only context in which they are associated with the BIOT.

I don't see a movement to abolish stars in heraldry, despite their prominent placement in the Confederate flag and the association with Communism. That seems more germane.

Well sure, while you're at it let's take .tv away from the Government of Tuvalu. It's just two letters right, nobody else associates it with that island nation either.

Funnily enough, the same legal reasoning that claims BIOT should not exist (dividing a colony before granting independence) could also be applied to Tuvalu if you wanted to argue that it has no legal right to be a separate state independent of Kiribati. The only difference is, Tuvalu's separation was in accord with the wishes of its indigenous people whereas the Chagos Islanders were shipped elsewhere. But then, nobody bothered asking the indigenous peoples of the USA how they felt about a new nation being founded on their land, and we all seem to tolerate the existence of that somewhat irritating country.

I hosted a little file sharing utility at fy.lc that recently vanished from the internet. I guess I always suspected this was a possibility given the general jankiness of nic.lc but it's still pretty disappointing. Nobody should run anything serious on a ccTLD.

> Nobody should run anything serious on a ccTLD.

Except of course if they’re from the country in question, in which case it carries extra end-user trust.

I'd trust a .com over a .lc even in Saint Lucia, ymmv

To the contrary, in lots of European countries even international brands buys ccTLDs for their regional sites, because that’s what the local population expects.

.com is often considered the “American” TLD, and you want to go to your local store, with local offers, prices and which speaks your language.

.com often effectively means you need to import and pay customs, and nobody wants that.

Not having an appropriate ccTLD will be major drawback in lots of markets. Nobody serious about their business is going to risk that.

We prefer ccTLD for local audience and .com for global audience. We even use .eu if audience is just EU.

Having a .com seems strange in my country.

But I think that more and more websites desire to target an international audience so battle over .com domains gets tougher and tougher.

I won't be surprised when I'll see the first .com domain being sold for $1 million.

Common wisdom says that is best to use a .com domain if target an international audience.

But how to pay millions of dollars for a reasonable short name if you start a new business?

Domains really shouldn't be tied to country of origin. Conceptually, it doesn't make sense to restrict DNS based on geopolitical boundaries. If a foreign company wants to register a .us domain, for instance, nothing should stop it.

the country should manage its own domain. every country has it own set of rules, and for me as a citizen of country i would not want it to be managed by another country where the thing im doing might be illegal but in my own is not. i agree there are not many reasons to not being able to buy a domain from another country but as is with telephone numbers in alot of countries u have to have some residence in a country to get a phone number (for example germany) the domain could be like that.

So much for the idea of the Internet breaking down political boundaries. I know it's been dead for a long time now, but there was a thought in the early days that it didn't matter where you where or who you are on the Internet, everybody has the same access and opportunities.

Why not both?

Countries manage their country-specific domains, and global entities manage the rest. The second part is exactly what is happening now. We just need to get the first in line.

The second part doesn't work either; see .org currently. Tor (with .onion addresses) is the only extant DNS mechanism that technically works (and not well) and that's practically unusable for >99% of people.

>So much for the idea of the Internet breaking down political boundaries.

I thought the modern idea is to embrace diversity.

Imagine if Exoticstan managed all of DNS and their rules prohibited websites that your country allowed and even saw as culturally important. It's to avoid scenarios like that, that having a country specific tld is important. If a country has a conflict with whoever manages the DNS root, they could hardcode themselves as owning their cctld.

> it doesn't make sense to restrict DNS based on geopolitical boundaries.

Sure it does because those geopolitical boundries make sense for things like e-commerce. As a Canadian, I know that a site having a .ca domain will definitely ship to my address.

>As a Canadian, I know that a site having a .ca domain will definitely ship to my address.

Unless it's used as a domain hack by someone in another part of the world.

If whitehouse.gov let their registration lapse... watch out.

They'll register whitehouse2.gov or therealwhitehouse.gov

I always thought it was odd that .com, .org, and .net were international but .gov, .edu, and .mil was US only.

It was strange when we had a couple global tld and the rest were ccTLDs. Now that anybody with cash can buy a tld from ICANN, it is less strange.

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