You Don't Own Your .io or .ai. You Rent a Country's Politics | Hacker News Reader

You Don't Own Your .io or .ai. You Rent a Country's Politics

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44 pointsspeckx15 comments

All domains are pretty much rented... I know it's more fragile with cc-tld's but really, given the corporate interests behind other TLDs and the use of trademarks to re-settle established lands, so to speak... I wouldn't trust any domain to always exist.

That said, despite it being in a position where it would have normally disappeared, I don't think .io is going anywhere... there's way too much interest in keeping it around. I'd go so far as to suggest that maybe it should become "not" a "cc-tld" despite it being two characters and having it's origins in a national definition.

Compared to some other cc TLDs (like .ly, .ga) that are used for domain hacks, at least the ones for the BoTs (.sh, .ai, etc) are politically stable.

On topic when draw.io (diagrams.net) realized that, from https://www.drawio.com/blog/move-diagrams-net/#io-domains

    There are two major problems with .io domains:

    The first is that the islands which should own the domain suffix, don't, thanks to a wonderful piece of modern day British Imperialism. If you ever feel the need to donate to us, please give it to a more worthy cause.

    Secondly, there was a security issue with the .io domain. In 2017, a researcher managed to take control of four of the seven authoritative name servers for the .io domain. We accept that mistakes can happen, strong processes limit the chances of them happening, but they still can.

Same applies for .com/.net, except it's USA's politics. Which you may or may not consider more reliable. But yea, ccTLD domain hacks are pretty damn stupid.

not quite the same, gtld != cctld they are governed way differently.

Yea, but governance structure can be changed on a political whim. .io is efficiently governed as a gTLD now, even if it is a ccTLD. While .com/.net/.org are generic and governed by ICANN, the registry is VeriSign, a USA-based company, and ICE made it explicit already in 2010 they can seizure these any time they see fit. Back in 2010 it was mostly for genuine law-enforcement ends (whatever these ends justified the means is another story), but with what became of ICE recently, I would not bet on anything.

Nobody owns a domain of any TLD otherwise they would only pay for it once and it would be theirs forever assuming they are not violating trademarks.

BUT:

1. For generic TLDs like .com/net/org/.<all kind of new ones>, the rules mostly come from ICANN, the registry, and the registrar.

2. For country-code TLDs like .de/io/to/io/ai/ly, the rules come from that ccTLD's own registry. Best example AFAIK: .ly domains must not contain obscene contents contrary to Libyan law or Islamic morality (which was a driver for bit.ly's domain change)

So ccTLDs are not simply "generic TLD rules plus country rules." They are their own category with their own policies. Trademark violations are one way to lose a domain, but not the only one. The risk is MUCH higher when using a country TLD.

Agreed. Adding to that some country TLD's are a PITA to obtain and maintain. I recall having to jump through many hoops for .PR in that I needed a local legal presence and I had to have very specific parameters in the zone settings for serial, refresh, retry, expire, and negative ttl. With no relation to any RFC's They periodically checked too.

There were other annoyances for .de, .ca, .fr and .cn. The .cn ccTLD has similar issues you mentioned for .ly. I never had to register a .ly. Mark Monitor was able to check the box for a legal presence for a few ccTLD's. Oh and the only ccTLD we were actually going to use was .cn as we would have to hand over all SSL cert keys to them. The others were just for anti-fraud and anti-squatting reasons thus making it all that more annoying to jump through hoops.

This was why, despite quite a few of us enjoying the gag, we gave up the domain `libcore.so` at CoreOS many, many years ago. Too much of a supply chain risk.

What is .so? Somalia?

Yes

Choose the country domain the matches your citizenship.

Most countries protect their own much better than foreigners!

The only domain you can ever own is a .onion domain.

> queer.af :)

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