16% of Web3 companies use .io. ccTLDs have been removed five times in history.

Written by Karen, Foresight News

The United Kingdom has relinquished sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago in the British Indian Ocean Territory and handed it over to Mauritius. This historic moment marks the end of British colonialism in Africa and has also sparked widespread discussion about the future of the highly anticipated .io top-level domain.

what happened?

Amid growing geopolitical competition, on October 3, the United Kingdom and Mauritius issued a joint statement that they had reached a historic political agreement on the exercise of sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago. Under the terms of the treaty, the United Kingdom will agree that Mauritius has sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago, including Diego Garcia (where the US and UK military bases are located). Although the agreement is still pending the finalization of the treaty, both parties have pledged to complete the relevant procedures as soon as possible.

However, with the transfer of the Chagos Archipelago from the United Kingdom to Mauritius, the future of the .io top-level domain has become uncertain. This change may have a profound impact on many websites with .io domain names. Because the .io ccTLD was originally assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) and registered by a British private company, the Internet Computer Bureau (ICB), which is currently owned by the US Identity Digital.

The top-level domain name ".io" comes from the English name of the British Indian Ocean Territory: IO, the abbreviation of Indian Ocean in British Indian Ocean Territory, is a country and regional top-level domain (ccTLD) owned by the British overseas territory of the British Indian Ocean Territory in the Internet domain name system. The io domain name extension has been in existence since 1997, and the earliest registered .io domain name was levi.io, which was registered by the clothing company Levi's in 1998. According to a report in the UK (Independent) in 2014, "The British government receives a portion of the profits from the sale of Internet domain names in the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Under the terms of the agreement reached with ICB, the British government can receive an undisclosed share of the £60 fee when each .io domain name is activated. Paul Kane, founder of ICB and an expert in Internet infrastructure, also confirmed that the British government received part of the fees paid for the use of the ".io" domain name. "

Historically, ccTLD domain names have been removed five times

The future of ".io" is largely determined directly by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ICANN. However, it is important to know that ".io" is a country and region top-level domain name (ccTLD), and political considerations override technical and commercial considerations.

ICANN, as mentioned above, is a non-profit corporation based in California, USA, created on September 30, 1998, to take over Internet-related tasks including managing the allocation of domain names and IP addresses. According to Domain Incite, ccTLDs have only been removed from the DNS root five times since ICANN was founded in 1998. In all but one case, the trigger for removal was a change to the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 list of the International Organization for Standardization.

1. ".yu" was originally a ccTLD owned by Yugoslavia in the Internet Domain Name System. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia disintegrated in 1992 due to civil war, but with the disintegration of Serbia and Montenegro, the remaining allied states of Yugoslavia, in 2006, ".yu" stopped accepting new registration applications from March 2008, but it was not until 2010 that ICANN finally deleted .yu from the DNS root.

2. ".tp" was originally the domain name of the Portuguese Timor country and region top-level domain (ccTLD), which was officially launched in 1997 when the country was still under Indonesian occupation. After the country gained independence in 2022 and was renamed East Timor, ISO assigned it a new code TL and removed TP from its list, but ".tp" was completely removed from the DNS root in February 2015.

3. ".zr" was originally the domain name of the Zaire country's regional top-level domain (ccTLD). As Zaire resumed its name as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it was later changed to .cd. In 2001, ".zr" was officially discontinued. ".zr" is the first ccTLD to be removed by IANA.

4. ".an" was originally a ccTLD domain name assigned to the Netherlands Antilles, an overseas territory of the Netherlands. After the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles in 2010, Curacao used the .cw domain name, Sint Maarten used the .sx domain name, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba obtained the .bq domain name, and ISO also removed AN from its list. In 2015, the ".an" domain name was completely discontinued.

5. ".um" is a ccTLD domain name for the United States Minor Outlying Islands, but it is not used. In 2007, ICAN deleted the .um domain name from the master list of domain names.

However, it is worth noting that ".su" is a special case. The ccTLD ".su" assigned to the former Soviet Union was activated on September 19, 1990. Although the Soviet Union has now collapsed, the domain name is still available.

Where is the future of “.io” going?

According to the ccTLD decommissioning policy, ccTLD eligibility is determined by the associated country or territory assigned in the ISO 3166-1 standard. When a country or territory is removed from this standard, its eligibility expires and it needs to be decommissioned after an orderly transition period. By default, ccTLDs will be deleted after five years. ccTLD managers can apply for an extension, but they need to provide appropriate justifications. Extensions can only be extended for a maximum of 5 more years, so the maximum possible period of formal decommissioning is 10 years. Of course, ccTLD managers can decide to decommission domains earlier at their discretion.

If it is determined that the eligibility of a ccTLD has changed, the ccTLD manager will be notified of the intent to issue a deactivation notice at the time of the IANA decision. The ccTLD manager will have the opportunity to designate an alternate contact to handle deactivation-related notices.

As Domain Incite states, for .io, the core concerns facing .io domain name registrants are whether the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) can continue to retain the IO allocation on the ISO list after the name change, and whether the archipelago still has the unique territorial qualifications to obtain ccTLD status. If BIOT only exists as part of Mauritius and is no longer considered an independent territory by the United Nations, the survival of the .io domain name will face severe challenges and may be removed. On the other hand, if BIOT still maintains its independent territory and retains the qualifications for obtaining ccTLD, then the situation will become more complicated. Of course, there is also the possibility that ".io" will follow the old path of ".su", but the probability of this is relatively small.

Which Crypto Companies Are Using .io?

In the field of computer science, "IO" is often used as an abbreviation for "I/O" (i.e. Input/Output), which makes the .io domain name naturally suitable for technology-related services. Coupled with its simplicity, this top-level domain is very popular with technology startups and software companies, and is also used by many projects in the Crypto field. In addition, the .io domain name is also the preferred domain name for video game projects, because "io" in game terminology represents browser-based multiplayer games.

According to NetEase's "Technology World", "Glitch and GitHub Pages both use .io domain names for user-created websites and applications, and the Itch.io game store also uses the domain name. The domain name has made almost 40 million US dollars, which means that there may be more than one million .io domain names registered." It is worth mentioning that in 2021, the "Metaverse.io" domain name was sold for 1.14 million yuan, which is the .io domain name with the highest current public transaction price.

Among the approximately 20,000 Web3 companies and projects included in Foresight Wiki, nearly 16% of the companies use .io domain names, including but not limited to Matter Labs, ZKsync, Arbitrum, Optimism, Scroll, Sei, Damus, CoinFund, Scallop, Mask Network, TrueFi, Raydium, DODO, etc. It is worth mentioning that Gate.io uses the name with the main domain name as the brand name.

As for the future of .io domain names, Foresight News will continue to pay attention.

Reference:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/joint-statement-between-uk-and-mauritius-3-october-2024

https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/io.html

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io#cite_note-9

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/government-accused-of-profiting-from-sales-of-chagos-islands-io-domain-name-9574316.html

https://domainincite.com/30406-five-times-icann-deleted-a-cctld-and-what-it-means-for-io

https://www.iana.org/help/cctld-retirement

https://www.163.com/dy/article/JE69H0JR05564QCM.html