A common TLD may disappear

When the Mauritius group of islands gained independence in 1968, not all of the islands that had long been considered part of the country were included. Three years ago, Britain moved from the Chagos Islands and allowed the United States to build a military base on the island of Diego Garcia, while the residents were forced to leave.

The two countries have been at loggerheads over the Chagos Islands ever since – until last week when the new British government announced that an agreement had been reached to return the entire Chagos Islands to Mauritius. Britain and the United States have a 99-year lease on Diego Garcia, but the rest of the islands will be repopulated.

What does this have to do with TLDs on the Internet? Well, the Chagos Islands – which Britain called the British Indian Ocean Territory – have their own ISO country code: IO. But since the “country” now disappears when it becomes part of Mauritius, the ISO is expected to quickly remove the country code.

IANA bases its list of top-level domains for various countries and regions (“ccTLDs”) on the ISO list, and when IO no longer exists, IANA will follow suit and retire the .io top-level domain, the historian wrote Gareth Edwards on Every.to. The organization actually has one Detailed process How to do this.

It usually takes five years for a country code top-level domain to expire after a decision is made to retire it, but administrators can request an extension of up to five years, so .io domains can remain in total for ten years. However, the rules state that new registrations of domains with a retired TLD must stop as soon as possible.

Gareth Edwards wrote that nothing is written in stone and that the IANA could decide to make a special exception for .io. Perhaps Mauritius could take over the code as an alternative TLD for the archipelago. What speaks to some sort of compromise is that there are thousands of companies using the TLD. What counters this is that IANA has had bitter experience with similar incidents, including when the .su domain was kept (for the Soviet Union) and given to Russia as a replacement for .ru. Over the years, this top-level domain has become something of a wild west, writes Gareth Edwards.