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Comment by gnfargbl | Hacker News Reader

ICANN actually has a relevant written policy at https://www.iana.org/help/cctld-retirement.

The short answer is that -- if ICANN follows the policy -- then following the removal of IO from ISO-3166-2, the ccTLD has five years to initiate an orderly shutdown.

The ccTLD manager may request that this be extended to a maximum of ten years, but to do so they need to have reasons beyond a general desire to retain the existing ccTLD.

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From the policy document:

"ccTLD eligibility is determined by the associated country or territory being assigned in the ISO 3166-1 standard."

So how does a country code get removed from the ISO 3166-1 list? A cursory web search wasn't very revealing.

That's a very good question. I don't know; does any other HN'er?

The most information I can find is that the standard is maintained by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency [1]. Additions appear to be mostly at the direction of the United Nations [2], but I couldn't find a clear procedure as to how a country code is removed. I'm also unclear on who makes the decision to mark codes as exceptionally reserved.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166#ISO_3166_Maintenance_...

[2] https://www.iso.org/iso-3166-country-codes.html

Perhaps the operative question is how did IO get into the ISO 3166 in the first place? My guess would be as part of the UK defensively creating the illusion of it being a legitimate territory.

It was in the original 1974 standard [1]. No real idea on the politics of the time, but Britain had "paid" Mauritius £3 million for the islands less than ten years before [2], and of course the US base on Diego Garcia was already established.

I use the scare quotes because Mauritius was a British colony at the time, and so the offer was quite possibly one that the Mauritians couldn't refuse. That, and the fact that £50m (in today's money) seems ridiculously cheap.

[1] https://cdn.standards.iteh.ai/samples/2448/e41694ad96e34e95b...

[2] https://www.biot.gov.io/about/history/

The ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency makes the changes to ISO 3166. They follow notifications from and include members from these other bodies:

    Association française de normalisation (AFNOR), France
    American National Standards Institute (ANSI), United States
    British Standards Institution (BSI), United Kingdom
    Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN), Germany
    Institut Marocain de Normalisation (IMANOR)
    Iran National Standards Organization (INSO)
    Standards Australia (SA)
    Standards Council of Canada (SCC)
    Swedish Standards Institute (SIS)
    International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
    International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)
    International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
    Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
    Universal Postal Union (UPU)
    United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE)

https://www.iso.org/iso-3166-country-codes.html

You're right these agencies make changes... but they don't decide if a country gets a ccTLD or not. They take their cue from the UN's Country Names bulletin, which in turn requires the country to be member state of the UN, or a member of one of its agencies, or a party to the Statute of the International Court of Justice

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1#Criteria_for_inclus...

Since the list was originally developed for post, there's precedent for far-flung regions of a country to have their own codes, even when they're not considered politically separate. French Guiana, for example, is considered fully part of France, and yet it has its own code (GF).

The Chagos Archipelago is a good distance from the rest of Mauritius, and so it may perhaps retain a separate registration on the ISO list.

ISO 3166-1 is maintained by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency which has members from agencies like ANSI, BSI, DIN, …. No way are they going to just let .io simply go out of existence. It's more like that Mauritius will attain ownership and then manage it similarly to other 'gTLDs'.

  .co is owned by Columbia
  .tv is owned by Tuvalu
  .me is owned by Montenegro

.co, .tv, and .me are ccTLDs not gTLDs. They're the ISO 3166 codes for those countries.

Some English-speaking people may treat them as global and not linked to countries, but they're not. The difference with .io is that BIOT was never a country and soon won't exist - whereas those countries have existed and will continue [1] to exist.

[1] quite possibly with the unfortunate exception of Tuvalu

That’s why I put gTLD in quotes.

> .co is owned by Columbia

aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombia

(not the NYC school, or the TV network)

Given ICANNs history they’ll probably want to do some “fact finding” in Mauritius, after which they’ll make a decision that most benefits their back pocket.

Thank you for digging into this and getting an actual answer!

You're welcome. I think people here are often surprised that the internet registries actually spend time thinking about this stuff, and developing policy for it. But they do, and the results are easily accessible -- the link I provided was the top search engine hit for "icann cctld retirement policy".

Great info!

Hope ICANN (a corrupt organization) doesn't "change its mind" about this at the last moment, due to some "lobbying" involved. We'll see!

By definition, any organization not composed entirely of elected representatives making completely transparent, documented decisions in perpetuity, 100 percent correctly is corrupt.

A sword of damacles hanging over every single discussion on HN is "The internet is still largely unregulated" because that discussion leads to "the internet is regulated by private bodies who got there first."

no one wants to admit that our employers and thus we benefit from this wild west of corruption.

ICANN, IANAL, CABF, Moz Security Council.... all made of of public corporations vying to make money.

Until

I agree that transparent and documented decisions are good evidence for not being corrupt, and I can see how you could argue that they're required (as a non-corrupt organisation that hides the reasoning behind its decisions is largely indistinguishable from a corrupt organisation that coincidentally makes the same decisions), but what do elections have to do with anything?

Does this mean that all .io domains will cease to exist?

.su still exists, so there's precedent for keeping a "legacy" ccTLD of a non-existing entity.

ICANN's position is that their policy is triggered by changes to ISO-3166. The code SU has not been removed from ISO-3166-2; instead it is "exceptionally reserved" (as is the code UK).

If the standards committee takes the same approach with IO, then it's possible that gives ICANN a route not to apply this policy. However, if IO is deleted completely, then my reading is the policy would apply.

I use a .io domain for some of my email. I’m starting to think I should divest and change my email everywhere instead of continuing to add more places to it. And worry about monitoring for a potential future shutdown.

Luckily, since I used a custom address for each place I used it (so I could track and block spam easily), I kept a spreadsheet of every site I used it with. 55 sites so far and I haven’t had to block anything for being sold, so it hasn’t really been that useful so far.

Same here.

Luckily, tho, I use alias from my mail provider, so I don't have to write them down.

Also, a password manager, so it won't be too much work changing my E-Mail Domain Name.

But it's still unfortunate. It's just a ccTLD what does it matter, let us keep it.

I have it setup in Proton where anything sent my domain goes to my inbox. So I write it down to keep track, just for my own knowledge of what I used (but it’s not technically needed). The nice thing is I don’t have to set anything up before I start to use it. I can just type sitename@mydomain.io and it shows up in my inbox, which has made it very low maintenance. I tried to setup aliases in the past and it became more work than I wanted.

The idea was if I got spam, I’d know who not to trust in the future, and could easily send anything to that address to spam/trash.

I use a password manager as well, and have all the accounts tagged in there as well. The spreadsheet was basically a backup, and for if I gave an email address out that wasn’t actually tied to an account I’d have a password for.

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