The end of a well-known domain ending is approaching. Due to political changes, the era of the top-level domain *.io, which is particularly popular among startup companies and in crypto circles, will soon end. The background: the associated country is “disappearing”. CC0 / RainbowSilver2ndBackup / Creazilla
With .io, one of the better-known alternatives to more common domain extensions will soon disappear. The background is that the British government is giving up control over the so-called “British Indian Ocean Territory”, like the journalist Gareth Edwards reported in his newsletter at Every. It is a small tropical atoll in the Indian Ocean, also known as the Chagos Archipelago. In the future, the archipelago will be assigned to the larger island state of Mauritius, which is located around 1,100 nautical miles from the southeastern coast of the African continent.
The Chagos Islands or the British overseas territories in the Indian Ocean probably play a rather small role in world politics. However, .io is a welcome change for the world of Internet domains. Anyone who wants to give themselves a modern look, for example to appear “edgy” or to appeal to a technology-savvy target group, has been happy to use “.io” until recently. One of the reasons for this could be that .io is often equated with the English abbreviation I/O for “Input/Output”. *.io has always been popular with well-known internet services: Github is still accessible under a .io domain.
Google has also been using a .io domain since 2008 to host the website for its Google I/O developer conference. In addition, there are other young or not so young companies that used the .io domain for themselves. It is often forgotten that .io is a kind of country code, so to speak. i.e. it is a “Country Code Top Level Domain” (ccTLD) and therefore stands for a specific country.
And these are the Chagos Islands, better known as the British Indian Ocean Territory. The USA and Great Britain have operated a large military base on the islands since the late 1960s. The neighboring nation of Mauritius has always claimed the islands for itself. After more than 50 years, the dispute with the British is now over, so that the islands can become part of Mauritius.
In return, the British and Americans will be allowed to operate their military bases on the islands for another 99 years. As soon as the relevant treaties are signed, there should no longer be a “British Indian Ocean Territory”. How to proceed with the TLD .io is currently unclear. It is likely that the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) will remove the country code IO from its specification.
Because the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) regulates the allocation of top-level domains on this basis, the distribution of domain names under this TLD will probably also be discontinued. Afterwards, all existing .io domains will probably be gradually abolished.
In any case, this would be the normal course of events, but whether the IANA and its parent ICANN will ultimately act this way is currently still open. It remains to be hoped that there will not be the same chaos around .io as around the “.su” TLD of the former Soviet Union.
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