How would IANA changing one TLD into a different TLD and then everyone using the old TLD migrating everything to the new TLD be any easier than everyone just migrating everything to a new TLD?
In either case there wouldn’t be anything “in unison” about it.
Yes I have. ccTLDs are 2 characters, as I specified above. To make .io into a gTLD you’d need to add a third character, which wouldn’t do anything to help the companies who are using .io today.
The companies who are using .io who aren’t associated with the Indian Ocean Territories will however have 5 years (or 10 if an extension is requested) to migrate to a gTLD before .io is retired.
gTLDs are 3 characters or more (.com .net .org ). 2 characters TLDs are reserved for ccTLDs. This allows a CLEAR separation between gTLDs and ccTLDs, so that precisely what’s happening with the .io ccTLD doesn’t happen on accident.
The reason is because ccTLDs need to match the alpha-2 code of the country as it exists in ISO 3166-1. This is because IANA doesn’t want to be the arbiter of which countries exist or not. You get a code, you get a ccTLD. No code, no ccTLD.
.su exists in spite of the policy of IANA, not because of them. The popularity of a ccTLD has no relevance to its continued existence.
ITT: People who think this won’t happen because they don’t understand the first thing about IANA, ICANN, their policies, ccTLDs, or the history of this kind of thing happening before. While ICANN has the authority to allow the .io domain to continue to exist, it would be a complete reversal on their newly established policy for retiring ccTLDs, which was primarily motivated by being burned on this exact type of thing happening before.
A good example is the .yu ccTLD which after a long back and forth was finally retired in 2010.
That is not what will happen. 2 letter TLDs are reserved for ccTLDs.
Yes, that is how the ccTLD is enforced by IANA.. And it is in fact an automatic process. There is a policy for requesting a single 5 year extension, but that extension request must be accompanied by a retirement plan, otherwise by policy the ccTLD has a 5 year grace period before being removed.
They will not retire a domain under heavy use such as .io.
Heavy use has not stopped them from attempting to retire other ccTLDs, it just delays the process.
The current ccTLDs that have outlived their countries still exist because the retirement policy wasn’t finalized until 2022 and in all cases, ICANN has been moving towards retiring them.
You gave .su as an example for IANA not retiring ccTLDs, but the .su debacle is one of the major motivators behind their policy of retiring all ineligible ccTLDs.
ICANN could allow the .io domain to live on, but doing so would be a complete 180 from their current policy.
Multiple instances are confusing because they matter a whole hell of a lot, and understanding exactly how instances federate things to each other is absolutely crucial to having a good experience on the fediverse.
Anyone who thinks it’s simple or doesn’t matter, or makes that annoying comparison to email really just don’t understand how the fediverse actually works.
The coexistence of .gb and .uk is only because .uk predates the rule by a few months. You could say it was grandfathered in, though they are both reserved in ISO 3166-1. This one isn’t a good example of something that can happen decades after the rule was put in place.
As for .eu it isn’t really an exception, .eu is reserved in ISO 3166-1.