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Comment by icedchai | Hacker News Reader

I doubt .io will disappear. .su is still running decades after the fall of the USSR.

Aye, any attempt at retirement would quickly result in a new '.io' gTLD replacing the '.io' ccTLD. The more reasonable concern is not that the ccTLD is retired, but that registration rules and/or prices are changed.

I doubt that .io could become a gTLD, given the established practice of using ISO 3166 alpha-2 codes for country-specific domain names. A .io gTLD would be dependent on obtaining some sort of long-term reservation for IO in ISO 3166 and perhaps even in existing standards that extend it, and this is unlikely to be granted given how tight the alpha-2 encoding space is already.

They could just stop allowing new .io registrations until we begin colonizing Jupiter.

But it's run governed by ICANN, so they might bend your way if you got the $$$, and millions of it.

The gtld program requires TLDs be at least 3 characters long.

I wasn't aware of that! Well, my mistake; retirement is a real concern after all.

well, fuck.yu became fuck.me

For context .yu was the ccTLD for Yugoslavia, and .me is the ccTLD for Montenegro, which is one of the states formerly part of Yugoslavia before its dissolution.

How many .yu domains were registered when Yugoslavia broke up? Back in 1992 most people had never even heard of the Internet, especially in politically unstable third world countries. You could probably count the number of .yu domains registered on your hands.

By virtue of being a former Soviet satellite, .yu was second-world, not third-world.

Yugoslavia was communist but no Soviet satellite... See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito%E2%80%93Stalin_split

In fact it was a founding member of the non-aligned movement which came to be called third world.

There is some doubt in that. Many suspect it was just a facade to trick the West.

The "Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" (FRY) existed until 2003, when it was renamed to "Serbia and Montenegro", which split into separate countries of "Serbia" and "Montenegro" in 2006. "Serbia and Montenegro" was still using the .yu ccTLD until 2006.

.yu was retired in 2010. Still seeing some old outdoor ads with it here in Montenegro.

>Back in 1992 most people had never even heard of the Internet, especially in politically unstable third world countries.

I never remember Yugoslavia as being a third world country. Purchasing power wasn't as high as in US but it certainly wasn't third world level and no people died of hunger, or because they did not afford health care. Also, housing was affordable.

> fuck.me is a

> premium domain name

> ...but it could be yours!

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