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Comment by kijeda | Hacker News Reader

ICANN is finalizing a policy that will govern this question. In short, if adopted, 5-10 years after the country is removed from the ISO 3166-1 standard it will be removed as a TLD.

https://www.icann.org/en/announcements/details/ccnso-propose...

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> There is a good faith obligation to ensure an orderly shutdown of the retiring ccTLD which takes into consideration the interests of its registrants and the stability and security of the DNS.

> The Manager of the ccTLD should be notified (Notice of Removal) that the ccTLD shall be removed from the Root Zone five years from the date of the notice.

ICANN’s lack of perspective is stunning. If I own a domain on any TLD my interest as a registrant is having that TLD around forever. I’m one of the few that thinks the new TLDs are an amazing opportunity for people to build brands and identities. I’m also never going to rely on anything but .com because I don’t trust ICANN.

ICANN is one of the most important institutions around, so it’s sad to see them working so hard for themselves and the registries while making registrars and registrants a secondary consideration (IMO).

Do you trust your country to continue existing? I do.

Yeah, if .ca disappears it means I probably have a bigger problem.

I think .ca is one of the safer TLDs if you’re Canadian.

ccTLDs tend to be subject to much more baroque terms. For example, restrictions on citizenship, residency, or "genuine connection", restrictions on content and speech and other legal requirements.

For example when UK left the EU then all UK registrants of .eu domains were made to relinquish them. No grandfathering. This kind of nonsense doesn't occur on .com

.eu is not a ccTLD, because the European Union is not a country.

Yes, .eu is a ccTLD. "EU" appears in ISO 3166-1, a list of codes for countries and other geographical purposes, under the Exceptional Reservations category. TLDs in use on the basis of an entry on ISO 3166-1 are known as "country code top-level domains," even if the use of the word country is ambiguous or administratively incorrect.

For example, no one (well, perhaps we should say few) would argue that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is not a country, yet it operates ccTLD .uk which is not a country code assigned to a sovereign entity. GB is the country code for that country; UK is an exceptional reservation.

> For example when UK left the EU then all UK registrants of .eu domains were made to relinquish them. No grandfathering. This kind of nonsense doesn't occur on .com

Do you happen to have a source that supports that claim? I've registered .eu domains in the past and I never had to even offer any proof of citizenship or residency or anything of the sort. I searched for the domains, clicked on "buy", and that was that.

The parent is correct, in theory .eu requires residency or citizenship in order to register a domain[1]. After Brexit holders of .eu domains that did not meet the criteria lost their domains[2].

And the .eu is not the most restrictive ! I am a French citizen but live outside the EU, so I can't get a .fr domain (at least, again, in theory - haven't tried in practice) but I could get a .eu one.

[1]: https://eurid.eu/en/register-a-eu-domain/rules-for-eu-domain...

[2]: https://eurid.eu/en/register-a-eu-domain/brexit-notice/

Your registrar isn't doing the necessary due diligence then - mine made me send them a scan of either passport/ID or residency permit.

https://eurid.eu/en/register-a-eu-domain/brexit-notice/

Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, USSR have all disappeared in my lifetime. Austria disappeared briefly in my grandparents’ lifetime. Somaliland’s legal existence was extinguished in ~1966 and the international community is not letting its practical existence get in the way of refusing to recognize it.

Wars of conquest, civil wars, dissolution and change happen.

A country can simply change its name without major conflict. The people still exist. Law and order never breaks down. But it becomes a "new" country.

That could result in existing TLDs going away.

One possible example would be Scotland voting to peacefully leave the UK. It's very possible the UK would change its name after that, since it's not really the union of those two kingdoms anymore.

> One possible example would be Scotland voting to peacefully leave the UK. It's very possible the UK would change its name after that, since it's not really the union of those two kingdoms anymore.

It's the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Scotland is part of the former bit (Great Britain) alongside England and Wales.

Theoretically Northern Ireland could join the Republic of Ireland and Wales and Scotland could both go independent, and then it’s definitely not a United Kingdom. What happens to the millions (?) of .co.uk websites?

It's a union of three kingdoms, or 2-and-a-bit kingdoms:

   England and Wales (927)
 + Scotland (1707)
 + Ireland (1802)
 - most of Ireland (1922), leaving only Northern Ireland

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland would probably change its name if Scotland seceded, but perhaps to the United Kingdom of England and Wales and Northern Ireland. The official ISO code (GB) would change (EI? EW?) but the reserved code (UK) need not.

Interestingly Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) still uses the .sz TLD.

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

If there's ever a need to change the British flag I hope the government takes the opportunity to incorporate the Welsh flag. It's easily the best flag in the UK if not Europe as a whole!

You can still buy Soviet Union TLDs (.su). Does this mean .su owners will lose their domains in 5-10 years? Seems like there should be some kind of grandfathering clause.

The country yes, the TLD not as much

For example .uk - If one day we decide to ditch the monarchy and become a republic I imagine this might change back to .gb

Everything would probably be grandfathered in of course being a reasonably populated TLD, and .gb would probably be wayyy less popular because it kinda sucks as a character combo, but it's a possibility.

> I’m also never going to rely on anything but .com because I don’t trust ICANN.

what's wrong with the other 2 of the "original 3" gLTDs: .net and .org?

i spent an afternoon digging into the ownership of all of this stuff, and .org felt like the safest option. .com and .net are more directly owned/operated by a US for-profit company (Verisign) who has complied with US requests to seize .com domains in the past. .org at least still has structural ties to a non-profit with chapters across the globe, even if it's incorporated in the US.

.org almost got bought by scummy rent-seeking bastards as of like a year or two ago. Wouldn't consider it that safe, personally.

Everyone running a high-level domain like that is essentially rent-seeking, no?

(Is there a better term for 'high-level domain'? It doesn't necessarily have to be a TLD after all.)

> Everyone running a high-level domain like that is essentially rent-seeking, no?

Possibly as a technical, economics definition. I'd say no because real registries are adding value. What I'd call rent-seeking here specifically is destroying the market just to increase one's share of it.

The value I see registries providing is in large-part just consistency. A .com should cost and act about the same 10 years from now as it does today. If you start exponentially increasing cost (well past inflation), you're mostly just holding everyone hostage that currently owns a domain, until everyone is priced out and the TLD is destroyed.

> there a better term for 'high-level domain'?

IMO TLD is fine for this level of conversation, I'm not 100% sure if it's technically correct or not in _all_ cases, but it gets the right idea across. A "domain registry" or just "registry" is a good term for an entity running a TLD.

Not to be over picky, but from my first memories of the Internet at uni (1990) there were 5 tlds, in addion to the ones you mentioned were ac (academic) and gov. Both are not open to the general public though so your point stands.

> in addion to the ones you mentioned were ac (academic) and gov

Wasn’t it .edu for education? .ac is the ccTLD of the Ascension Island.

.mil was there from the beginning IIRC. And .int came not much later.

Maybe thinking of ac.uk and such? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ac_(second-level_domain)

You can easily look this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain

> what's wrong with the other 2 of the "original 3" gLTDs: .net and .org?

I find it interesting which TLDs took off and which didn't. I see exceedingly little use the venerable of .biz and .info, for example, yet .co has seen broader adoption in a shorter time frame.

They’re probably ok, but .com is massive by comparison and there’s strength in numbers. Anything shady involving the .com TLD will get immediate, large scale publicity and pushback.

I would say com net and org but beyond that nope dont trust it for the most part. ICANN will fuck it up in a short sided ill advised money grab eventually

Something like this could fork the internet dns into multiple versions

There have been plenty of attempts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root

What will happen to .su? (Soviet union)

It all depends on the war. If Russia can defeat the NATO then .su might be useful again.. ;)

Russia can't defeat NATO.

More specifically, the Avangard hypersonic missile system may be just another exaggeration from the Putin regime. It is not known how reliable or precise it is, or if it actually works.

Are there any active .su domains?

Yes. And there is a growing number each year.

Finalizing and actually finalized are very different things in ICANN land. If they ever do try to implement this policy its likely to end up in court for years.

I can't see Afilias just rolling over when .io (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory) ends up needing to be removed.

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