This is not the crisis it's being portrayed as. Up until a year or two ago. .io was run directly by the ICB. It had issues as it's not straight forward managing root level dns and the other related tasks of a registry.<p>Since then a company called Afilias is running .io (they also run .org, .info among many others). Whoever maintains governance of the .io tld is separate from the actual infrastructure running .io. As long as the owners of .io want to keep cashing the checks then nothing will change as the whole operation is outsourced. This is similar to the island of tuvalu outsourcing all of .tv to verisign (they are the .com registry)<p>Source: I work in the domain industry
The .io domain name is both expensive and somewhat unreliable. For example: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15293578" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15293578</a><p>We have used it for many years at <a href="https://clara.io" rel="nofollow">https://clara.io</a>, but we are moving away from it back to .com for all new services.
> This week, the UN's general assembly voted overwhelmingly 116-6 to condemn the UK's occupation of the Chagos Islands. The non-binding resolution endorsed a decision by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in February that said the UK continued claim was illegal and the islands should be returned to the former British territory of Mauritius<p>The UK is a permanent member of the UN Security Council and has veto power on all substantive matters taken up by the Council.<p>Doesn't that mean that they can pretty much ignore anything the General Assembly or most other international bodies tell them to do, just like the United States, Russia, and China do, because actually enforcing anything usually involves something that ends up requiring some kind of action that will require Security Council approval?
I've always found the .io domain somewhat laughable for tech companies. Maybe its popularity was fueld by Google's I/O conference.<p>But except of legal affairs the climate crisis is the next reason not to rely on this domain. If the humanity continues its course the ".io island" will soon be under water.
Is there a precedent that points towards a possible outcome for .io? Has there been a similar case of a country ceasing to exist with an impact on its gtld?