Simon Willison’s Weblog

Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the Chagos Islands? This morning on the BBC: UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius. The Chagos Islands include the area that the UK calls the British Indian Ocean Territory. The .io ccTLD uses the ISO-3166 two-letter country code for that designation.

As the owner of datasette.io the question of what happens to that ccTLD is suddenly very relevant to me.

This Hacker News conversation has some useful information. It sounds like there's a very real possibility that .io could be deleted after a few years notice - it's happened before, for ccTLDs such as .zr for Zaire (which renamed to Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1997, with .zr withdrawn in 2001) and .cs for Czechoslovakia, withdrawn in 1995.

Could .io change status to the same kind of TLD as .museum, unaffiliated with any particular geography? The convention is for two letter TLDs to exactly match ISO country codes, so that may not be an option.