Google now treats .io as a gccTLD

260 days ago I posted a webapp I made on HN, listing all of the available remaining .io domains in order of most common words -- with 2, 3, 4, and 5 letter columns. It was completely free, but it got one upvote I think? The site is currently down, but if there's interest I can put it back online.

Did you know their rules state: "No .IO domain may be used, directly or indirectly, for any purpose that is sexual or pornographic or that is against the statutory laws of any Nation."?<p>The laws of ANY nation?! I founded a UGC .io startup in 2007 (we were the biggest .io site for quite a while), and while we never had any trouble, I find that clause worrisome.

I don't know how to feel about this. I've commented many times before, warning others about the .io domain and the consequences they'll face with ranking on Google. Now that won't be a problem. But let's face it, .io will never be as 'accepted' as .com by Billy Customer, and now squatters have a reason to go buying them all up, so good luck grabbing one for a techie startup or niche.

Sort of surprised .ly is missing. Maybe related to the conflict over there, because it was/is pretty widely used by startups

nic.io must be tickled pink. Queue the land grab!<p>In other words, I'm not sure this is a good thing or sets a good precedent. I understand the rationale as they're just reacting to what the industry is doing (I'm looking at you GH) but I imagine we'll see more of this in the future.<p>I say all this as a (legitimate) .io domain holder.<p>Somewhere there is a bailiwick just waiting for the crafting community to jump all over it.

Wow, someone at Google finally successfully championed the cause! Thanks to whoever you are if you're reading this.

May I know what does it do to be in the gccTLD list? Does it changes something for those website?

I've always thought the .io is much better than .co .co seems too much like a miss-spelling of .com

I'm surprised nobody has pointed out that this is not an official announcement from Google. It is merely an updated KB page.<p>Google is treating .io as gccTLD for at least 6 months.

What's the attraction of the .io domain? Seeing it crop up in many places and I'm not sure what the significance is.

I hope prices stay "high"; maybe $55+/yr is enough to keep the domain squatters in check to some extent.

Excellent. I'm prepping to launch <a href="http://rss.io" rel="nofollow">http://rss.io</a> and worried that the .io domain would kind of kill its discoverability in search results. Really happy to see this, as I'm sure many others are, too, who are using .io domains the same way.<p>Maybe people will want to take tele.io and newsies.io off my hands now (half kidding but seriously, email if you're interested :)).

Wow! They actually listened. Who would have thought..

Google, .im is missing from the list. Should have been treated almost equally to '.me'.. and .me got it's gTLD status right from the start.

I'm amazed at how fast this was done, seems like only weeks ago several people suggested this.

I think it would be better if google would let webmasters just tell them if you want them to treat your domain as gccTLD or not. I had some cool ideas for .mx, but if they want to treat it as Mexico-only, then what's the point of buying one?

Maybe I finally do something with my .io domain (or the countless .com domains I have registered)!<p>My .io has been hosted on GAE since the start. I wish GAE would support naked domains. <a href="http://www.macch.io/" rel="nofollow">http://www.macch.io/</a>

I'm curious how the average consumer (non-tech audience) views a .io domain.<p>I'm planning to build a consumer facing site and use .io as it's an easy way to get a decently good domain, but I don't want to scare people off with the domain.

Interesting. Years ago I wanted to do a side project and ended up acquiring the "words.io" domain name. I was also able to snag the wordsio.com as well to avoid some confusion.<p>Maybe this will get me to actually do something with it.

Mark this day next year to check for good expired .io domain names :-)

Would really like to see this happen with .ly domains too.

That's great! I'm guessing that a lot more startups are going to use a .io domain now since there are a lot of good domain names available.

Currently available as-of-this-moment 3-letter .io domain names:<p><a href="http://pastie.org/7809651" rel="nofollow">http://pastie.org/7809651</a>

This is pretty cool, I have been a huge fan of .io domain names for a long time. I even tried (unsuccessfully) to sell a, checked daily, list of the available three letter domain names for $19. There are currently 40 three letter word domain names left, there are a couple common acronyms like CST.io that are available too.<p>If interested <a href="http://andio.herokuapp.com" rel="nofollow">http://andio.herokuapp.com</a><p>EDIT: was.io and mph.io have been purchased since posting this comment, now 38 left.

Is there any way to register an io domain without your address and phone number showing up in the whois information?

This has inspired me to buy another .by domain, just on the offchance...

Hmm.. might be a good time to put my translation.io domain to good use.

What will the SEO effects of this be to existing .io site?

Thank you Google!

Hipsters win

so what?

You can buy the list of 30 remaining three letter words/common acronyms for $19: <a href="http://andio.herokuapp.com" rel="nofollow">http://andio.herokuapp.com</a><p>I'm sure you could do this yourself but why waste $19 of your time :)<p>There were 40 left about 2 hours ago, so far these domains have been purchased in the last 2 hours: was.io, mph.io, lie.io, avg.io, cum.io, ear.io, era.io, hwy.io, shy.io, sox.io