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It is a political issue, not a technical issue.

It may not be. But for country level TLDs a company or organization actually manages the DNS server software - it may run "in the cloud" or not - but someone still have to mange that software and the host it runs on. (In addition to enforcing the policies and payments associated with that TLD.)

gTLDs are not ccTLDs, though. The gTLDs all run under the same standardized contract / set of rules, and if you're already running 1 then it's pretty easy to scale that to running N.

ccTLDs though are much more like special snowflakes though. There's a large difference in policies, features, technical implementations, etc., from one ccTLD to another.

Can a ccTLD be converted to a gTLD? Is that sort of what happened to .io?