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Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

Is it considered ok or wise to obtain new .io (and .sh) domains today? In addition to the controversies (and more generally, misappropriating ccTLDs for funny domain names to result in a passive income benefitting only very few) there could also be a Brexit issue coming up here. Not that I have heard or expect the Brit gov to play hardball or something, but I could see closing .io to non-Brits be in-line with other decisions; for example, British citizens/companies can't use .eu domains post-Brexit AFAIK, with a grace period.

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That's just how .eu has always worked? If you're not from the EU (okay EEA to be more precise), you can't have one. It was never open to those outside of it. It wasn't some "fuck you in particular" kind of deal you make it out to be, nothing changed in its requirements.

Many made the (somewhat reasonable) assumption that it was for EUrope, not the European Union.

Sure, but it never was — the .eu domain was for the European Union from the beginning, and the ISO code EU is for the European Union. The .eu domain was opened by agreement to the EEA (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway) countries as well. But Swiss registrants have never been eligible (except via citizenship/residency in one of the qualifying states), for example.

When the UK left the EU, they didn't negotiate any EEA-style agreement to get access to .eu in their Brexit deal.

Those are confused with *.eu.org which is a predecessor of the .eu TLD. See https://nic.eu.org

Does that mean Swiss people cannot acquire .eu domains, as Switzerland is not part of the EU or EEA?

That is correct.

.uk domains owned by Russian citizens were pulled from under them last year. Whatever your opinion on this issue might be, I would take it as a warning. That particular registry seems to have a history of controversies and questionable behavior.

Really? From what I could find, they only pulled Russian registrars, not the domains, which you could transfer to a non-Russian-based registrar to renew: https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/15/nominet_suspends_russ...

There is zero indication that the British government would close off .io to non-Brits. You don't have to be a UK citizen or resident to get a .uk domain either. .eu requires citizenship or residency for registration, but most ccTLDs don't. The UK would not benefit in any way from cutting off .io registrations (or .sh for that matter).

Brexit was just a way to distract fools while picking their pockets, I don't see a real connection here.

I would skip on .io. Consider .dev or something else

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