That means the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist, along with the .io domain and countless websites.
What will happen is that the International Standard for Organization (ISO) will remove the country code “IO.” IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) which creates and assigns top-level domains, uses this code to determine which top-level country domains should exist. Once ‘IO’ is removed, IANA will start the process of retiring .io, which involves stopping new registrations and the expiration of existing ‘.io domains.‘
I don’t get this: shouldn’t Mauritius gain ownership of .io? Russia has .su, and it’s been over 30 years since the Soviets existed.
[edit] also, since there’s .whateveryouwant these days, why not just make .io a non-country TLD? That’s how it’s used anyway.
The problem is, once the middlemen gain power, they’re never gonna give you up. Music producers are a great example of this, as are telecoms companies.
All the current SaaS stuff is similar; the offerings LOOK similar, but they’re explicitly designed not to be a 1:1 match, so you can’t just take your business elsewhere, just like the mattress companies of old.
We’re even seeing this play out in the streaming video market, where each player has its own differentiator, moreso than we ever saw with traditional cable TV.
Standards are great, but middlemen have no incentives to not subvert them.