.an, the TLD that ceased to exist | Hacker News Reader

.an, the TLD that ceased to exist

en.wikipedia.org

33 pointspopcalc40 comments

Theoretically .io should cease to exist as well but apparently TLDs can be "too big to fail"[0], too. But officially, there's a 5 years-long grace period after which .io is deemed to be sunshined[1].

> In essence, a five-year time window will commence during which time usage of the domain will need to be phased out.

Related: "Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the Chagos Islands?"[2] (2024-10-03), 250p 210c

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/io_domain_uk_mauritiu...

[1] https://domainnamewire.com/2024/10/09/io-domain-names-arent-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729526

Why should they be "cleaned up" when there are TLDs like .blog, .hotel, .sucks, and other great ones (.great doesn't exist) that are allowed to be there?

.sucks really shouldn't exist, it's pretty explicitly set up as an extortion racket. They charge nearly $300 a year because they know that brands will pay a lot to prevent anyone else from getting brand.sucks.

> it's pretty explicitly set up as an extortion racket

Or rather for squatting. google.sucks is registered by Google LLC, microsoft.sucks by Microsoft Corporation, meta.sucks by Meta Platforms, Inc., and so on...

That's what they're saying. Corps are "forced" to buy their own domain with .sucks to prevent someone else from hosting something critical of the brands there. Whoever came up with .sucks gets to make money from people buying the domains just to prevent others from using them to actually host something.

Microsoft owns microsoft.sucks but they decided to redirect it to microsoft.com, which is a bit of an own goal. The others don't point to anything.

Looks like the redirect doesn't work for me since they couldn't get their SSL working.. Truth in advertising at least.

I'm going to claim dotsucks.sucks now.

Didn't somebody register dot.com and had an email address of dot.dot@dot.com? You could have dot.dot@dotsucks.com

You may be thinking of Tony Finch, dot@dotat.at.

Because gTLD must be at least three letters long, and ccTLD must be two letters long.

That's what the rule says. But of course, such rules are arbitrary and can be changed.

Two-char TLDs are a special case and are bound to a country. And this rule works both ways - Soviet Union wanted .ussr and was given .su

.su also still exists, despite its backing country having gone under over 30 years ago.

Because the country disappeared before that rules was set in place.

Yup. IANA dind't have ccTLD retiring procedures yet, when Soviet Union collapsed in 1990. But would they want to, they could delist it at any point. IANA holds the registry for all TLDs and - that's extreme and unlikely - could delist .ru, .ir or .kp at any moment.

The WLAN password at ICANN meetings is oneworldoneinternet. Keeping the net together needs continuous peacekeeping effort.

ICANN could delist in theory, that peacekeeping makes it impractical.

https://www.icann.org/en/blogs/details/the-chagos-archipelag...

I really hope .io lives on. Perhaps it could be a nice economic boost for Mauritius?

Agreed. I've also heard that a fairly significant amount of revenue for the island nation of Tuvalu actually comes from .tv domain registrations.

I really hope .io gets deleted.

Why?

So diagrams.net can have the last laugh.

That deal could still fall apart. Neither Trump's cronies nor the new government of Mauritius are keen on it.

According to Verisign, there’s over 1.5M domains registered on the .io TLD.

According to this Wikipedia entry, there were 800 domains registered on the .an TLD the year it was phased out.

Who knows what ICANN will do, but my guess is there will be a lot more pressure to keep the .io domain going even though the British Indian Ocean Territory is being ceded to Mauritius (.mu) at some point.

But, I mean, they can keep it, right? à la .SU

IIRC they put some administrative protections in place after Russia declined to give up .su – this is why we don't have .yu, despite Serbia (I think) wanting to keep it. Perhaps those can be overruled, though.

ICANN and IANA could effectively delist .su despite Russian Federation's "decline".

How much silly and outdated the WHOIS protocol is, the client queries IANA and only then is forwarded to RIPN (Russian Institute for Public Networks).

can Russia force local clients to go through ripn? it would fragment the web further but it's not like others haven't done their own fragmenting.

I'd guess that it's actually a requirement. Domains registered under ccTLDs (country-code top level domains) are managed by regional bodies[0]. In case of .su, it's either RIPN or ROSNIIROS[1] which manages the registry and registrations.

But again - IANA is universally queried about given TLD and redirects the query to regional body. In case of .su:

    > whois yandex.su
    
    % IANA WHOIS server
    % for more information on IANA, visit http://www.iana.org
    % This query returned 1 object
    
    refer:        whois.tcinet.ru
    domain:       SU
    organisation: Russian Institute for Development of Public Networks
    organisation: (ROSNIIROS)
    
    (...)
    
    # whois.tcinet.ru
    % TCI Whois Service. Terms of use:
    % https://tcinet.ru/documents/whois_ru_rf.pdf (in Russian)
    % https://tcinet.ru/documents/whois_su.pdf (in Russian)
    
    domain:        YANDEX.SU
    nserver:       ns1.snparking.ru.
    (...)
    state:         REGISTERED, DELEGATED

[0] USUALLY; .tk, .ga, .cf, .gq were managed by by infamous Freenom due to incapability of owners to do it themselves

[1] https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/su.html

> USUALLY

I think it's actually fairly common to delegate, no? .io was ran by just one guy at some point (or so I've heard). .us is run by GoDaddy (but I think the US government does keep them in check).

5 ccTLDs have been deleted https://domainincite.com/30406-five-times-icann-deleted-a-cc...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41781827

Wonder if we'll see a similar post at some point about .io domains

There’s so much infrastructure on companies that use .io domains that it’s impossible and pointless for anyone to think about removing the TLD.

For example, Docker Hub images are at docker.io. Why break those? Who knows where those URLs are cached?

Presumably Mauritius will inherit the domain like Russia inherited .su.

To send a signal to corporations and states to not rely on colonial regimes to endure for long.

Yeah… And which of the involved parties are so eager to send that kind of signal to Docker? What would it change?

Mauritius can make money from these registrations, like Anguilla makes a pretty penny from .ai today. They have no practical interest in seeing the .io TLD gone.

Mauritius isn't really the decider here and neither is ICAAN. There is an ISO committee that if they remove the name would kick the decision to Mauritius about how to make the transition.

The TLD they're using.

Presumably. Cutesy ccTLD hacks have given me the ick from the start. My last job used .io for our primary Kubernetes cluster and I found it distasteful. Is a fun little reference worth tying your infrastructure to the vagaries of geopolitics?

I hope not

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