The Disappearance of an Internet Domain

The IO top-level domain is used by a large number of technology services. It is a simple play off of the input/output functions in tech. Remember BIOS? Basic Input/Output System. It is a foundational concept and the fact that the British Indian Ocean Territory was also country code IO was a neat coincidence. However, that is changing!

Once this treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist. Various international bodies will update their records. In particular, the International Standard for Organization (ISO) will remove country code "IO" from its specification. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which creates and delegates top-level domains, uses this specification to determine which top-level country domains should exist. Once IO is removed, the IANA will refuse to allow any new registrations with a .io domain. It will also automatically begin the process of retiring existing ones. (There is no official count of the number of extant .io domains.)

The article itself was interesting to read the history that IANA and ICANN have dealing with country-level changes. Assuming current policies, everyone is going to have to vacate this top-level domain.

.io has become popular with startups, particularly those involved in crypto. These are businesses that often identify with one of the original principles of the internet--that cyberspace grants a form of independence to those who use it. Yet it is the long tail of real-world history that might force on them a major change.

It is a good reminder that the Internet doesn't live independent of everything else. This article doesn't touch on it but there are also real implications to using domains that are assigned to different countries. There have been previous run ins with countries not allowing registrations for reasons that we generally don't agree with. Or even more simple it can confuse systems based on assumptions. Being from Minnesota, there were a number of organizations that used the .mn TLD which is actually the designation of Mongolia. This could cause emails from those organizations to be treated as if they were coming from Mongolia, not Minnesota.

This is also an area where blockchain could play a crucial role, and specifically Ethereum Name Service (ENS). Why are all these TLD managed by countries? It is a way to allocate trust along a hierarchy. The presence of trust should trigger blockchain as a potential solution. The way that ENS names are resolved versus DNS names is radically different, and the governance model is as well. Don't be confused by the .eth TLD and think it is limited to that. DNS and ENS could merge into a tightly distributed system of both centralized and decentralized systems.