It's really quite unlikely that the management of the .io domain will change. There are currently negotiations about the Chagos Archipelago. They involve mostly the right to return (for the Chagossians) and the rent on the military base (for Mauritius). There have been calls for the Chagossians to receive whatever portion of the domain fees go to the UK government (how much that is isn't really known), but nobody has called for the .io domain to stop existing or be changed in management.

The resulting arrangement would virtually certainly be something like Tuvalu and .tv. Nobody is suggesting that they go into a Freenom-style domain mess like .ml and a few other domains (which some countries decided to just give away for free).