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That's because it's a ccTLD, not because it's not dot-com though. The powers that be could very well decide to just promote it to be a gTLD if they wanted to not destroy stuff for no reason. Actual gTLDs aren't susceptible to the same kinds of issues.

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> The powers that be could very well decide to just promote it to be a gTLD

No, they can’t do that. Every two-letter TLD is defined to be a ccTLD, and nothing else.

If they did that anyway, who would stop them? This seems like a great time to make an exception.

Literally, these are arbitrary strings following arbitrary rules. It's time to ditch ICANN and develop a parallel DNS that makes sense for today not the 90s.

Yes they can. They did it before after the Soviet Union broke up and they kept the .su TLD. It's still active. I'd argue that keeping around .io is more important than keeping .su around, seeing how many people and businesses use .io domains.

The Soviet Union ceased to exist. As long as the British Indian Ocean Territory is not breaking up or otherwise dissolving, it still is allocated a ccTLD.

But it is dissolving.

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