Five times ICANN deleted a ccTLD, and what it means for .io
With the future of .io coming into question this week, with the news that the UK will return sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius, I thought it would be a good time to see how ICANN has treated disappearing countries and territories in the past.
As far as I can tell, ccTLDs have been removed from the DNS root on only five occasions since ICANN came into existence in 1998.
While the circumstances differ, in all but one case the trigger for the deletion was a change to the International Standards Organization’s ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 list, which ICANN uses to decide who gets a ccTLD and what ccTLD they get.
.yu — Yugoslavia
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia broke up in 1992 due to a bloody civil war, but it wasn’t until 2010 that ICANN finally removed .yu from the root.
Splinter nations Slovenia, Croatia, North Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina were all assigned their own new country codes — .si, .hr, .mk and .ba — in the 1990s, but the now independent and separate states of Serbia and Montenegro, initially known as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, carried on using .yu.
When the country renamed itself the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro in 2003, the ISO list was updated to assign it the new code .cs, but the corresponding ccTLD was never actually delegated before the country broke up again in 2006, getting the ccTLDs .rs and .me the following year.
RNIDS, the .rs registry, carried on running .yu for a few years while it transitioned registrants to the new ccTLD. The process was not entirely painless, and ICANN had to keep .yu live longer than planned, before eventually deleting it April 1, 2010.
.tp — Portuguese Timor
The country we now know as East Timor or Timor Leste started the 21st century as Portuguese Timor, under Indonesian occupation. Its ccTLD was .tp.
After the country gained its independence in 2002, it renamed itself Timor Leste and the ISO assigned it the new code TL, deleting TP from its list.
IANA delegated .tl to the local government in 2005 and encouraged .tp registrants to migrate, but it took a full decade before it followed through and removed .tp from the root, in February 2015.
.zr — Zaire
The first ccTLD to get deleted by IANA under ICANN’s watch was .zr, which was no longer needed after Zaire changed its name to Democratic Republic of the Congo, receiving the code CD from ISO, in 1997.
The pre-ICANN IANA delegated .cd to the newly named country in 1997 and the registry operator set about moving .zr names to .cd. By 2001, that process was completed and .zr was deleted from the root.
.an — Netherlands Antilles
The Netherlands Antilles was a collection of former Dutch colonies in the Caribbean, until the territory split, with its component islands receiving new statuses under Dutch law, in 2010. The ccTLD was .an.
Curaçao got .cw, Sint Maarten (Dutch part) got the sexy-sounding .sx, and Bonaire, Saint Eustatius and Saba got to share .bq. ISO removed AN from its list.
The transition was a bit more complicated than usual, as .an registrants had to transfer to a new ccTLD based on what island they were on, but the local authorities managed it and within five years .an went poof.
.um — United States Minor Outlying Islands
This one’s unique in that it was deleted apparently simply because the registry operator couldn’t be bothered with it any more.
The United States Minor Outlying Islands are pretty much unpopulated, but strategically well-located, islands belonging to the US. There’s eight in the Pacific and one in the Caribbean.
Its ccTLD was operated by the University of Southern California until 2006, when somebody at ICANN noticed it appeared to be broken. When it approached USC for an explanation, it was told “they were no longer interested in managing the .UM domain”.
It had no registered domains, so there was no need for a transition plan and IANA deleted it from the root the following year.
The islands and their code are still on the ISO list and are still eligible for their ccTLD. Presumably it’s only the fact that the US government has asserted its authority over .um that has prevented an opportunist Just Some Guy registry from snapping it up to market .um domains as the leading destination for indecisive people or something.
What does this mean for .io?
ICANN’s policy on ccTLDs is pretty straightforward — your territory has to be on the ISO 3166 list and the ccTLD has to match the code ISO gives you. If your code drops off the list, you have five years, extensible to 10, to conduct an orderly transition before the TLD is retired.
Much like Portuguese Timor changing its name to Timor Leste to shuck off its enforced colonial branding, it seems inconceivable that the Chagos Archipelago will continue to be known as the British Indian Ocean Territory.
The key questions for .io registrants are: will the renamed BIOT keep the IO assignment on the ISO list, and will the archipelago continue to qualify as a distinct territory eligible for ccTLD status?
If BIOT simply becomes part of Mauritius, no longer recognized by the UN as a distinct territory, .io gains an existential threat. It would drop off ISO’s list and ICANN could issue it a retirement notice.
If BIOT remains a distinct territory and remains eligible for a ccTLD, the possibilities become a whole lot more interesting.
If Mauritius decides to change the territory’s name, there’s no problem. But if it asks ISO for a corresponding change of two-letter code to better reflect its new name, .io’s future is in doubt.
If the name is changed to something like “Chagos” and Mauritius wants a “C” code, only CB, CE and CJ are still available.
Theoretically, the government of Mauritius could unilaterally force an undesirable string change on Identity Digital, the American company that runs the .io registry, forcing a years-long migration to the newly chosen ccTLD.
I can’t imagine many of .io’s hundreds of thousands of registrants, particularly those using .io as a domain hack or to hitch themselves to a cool tech-startup bandwagon, being happy with a forced migration to, say, .cj.
The power to decoolify an entire TLD would be a compelling weapon in a redelegation fight. I’m deep into speculative territory here, but I can’t help but feel that Identity Digital is going to have to give Mauritius some money at some point.
Another possibility is that the registry, one of ICANN’s biggest funders, could lobby ICANN to change its policies and somehow grandfather .io in as a stateless ccTLD.
The fact that ICANN hasn’t acted to remove .su from the root, thirty years after the Soviet Union collapsed, could be seen as precedent.
The answers to .io’s future might be found in the proposed UK-Mauritius treaty, but that has yet to be published. As it has to be ratified by the UK Parliament we can expect it to enter the public domain before long.
Future of .io domains uncertain as UK hands over Chagos islands
The future of the .io ccTLD is up in the air today with the announcement that the UK is to hand over the British Indian Ocean Territory, also known as the Chagos Archipelago, to Mauritius.
The two governments announced today that they will sign a treaty agreeing “that Mauritius is sovereign over the Chagos Archipelago”. It’s being called the end of British colonialism in Africa.
Under the broad-ranging 99-year deal, native Chagossians, forcibly exiled since the late 1960s, will be free to return to the islands, apart from Diego Garcia, which is home to a strategically important UK-US military base.
There’s no talk yet of the future the ccTLD, of course — the governments have bigger fish to fry — but the change of sovereignty could have interesting implications for the .io registry and its registrants.
The positive spin is that owning a .io domain could now be seen as a less dubious ethical choice.
For almost a decade, largely unsuccessful boycotts of .io have been organized by tech bros upset with the treatment of the Chagossians. Now that they’re getting their land back, the queasiness of supporting “digital colonialism” might go away.
The bad news is that a change of sovereignty could ultimately lead to a change of registry, or the ccTLD disappearing entirely.
ICANN takes its lead from the International Standards Organization, specifically the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 list, when it comes to deciding whether a ccTLD deserves to exist and what two-letter code it gets.
If BIOT ceases to exist and is removed from the ISO list, as seems likely, there’s a strong case to be made that .io should cease to exist too.
Whether ICANN would actually remove .io from the DNS root is another matter, of course. While it has removed ccTLDs before when the associated country disappears, it has done so in a measured, managed fashion.
The Org also seems quite happy for .su to stay in the root, thirty-odd years after the Soviet Union fell apart.
But what of redelegation? There’s already a campaign to get .io redelegated to the Chagossians, and now that the UK is relinquishing its control of BIOT to Mauritius, the redelegation claim could be strengthened by the weight of a national government.
However, while .io is assigned to BIOT, the UK government says it has no formal relationship with the registry, so a change of ownership of the territory doesn’t necessarily mean the ccTLD changes owners.
The registry is run by a private UK company, Internet Computer Bureau, which nowadays is basically a shell owned by an Irish company that is in turn owned by US-based Identity Digital and its parent Beignet.
And ICANN typically doesn’t redelegate ccTLDs without the consent of the losing registry, which in many cases is Just Some Guy who spotted a business opportunity in the 1990s.
Niue, the Pacific island nation, has been fighting fruitlessly for control of .nu for two decades, for example, but the extant registry doesn’t want to hand it over so ICANN has not acted.
As I reported earlier this week, .io had turnover of almost $40 million last year, so it seems unlikely that Identity Digital would follow the UK’s lead and just hand it over.
While the registry does not disclose its registration numbers, the revenue suggests it’s possible over a million .io domains have been registered.
Lebanon’s ccTLD going back to Lebanon after ICANN takeover
ICANN’s board of directors has voted to redelegate Lebanon’s ccTLD to the country’s local Internet Society chapter, six months after the Org took it over as an emergency caretaker.
The resolution, passed at the weekend, as usual with ccTLD redelegations does not get into any depth about the switch, other than to note IANA has ticked all the requisition procedural boxes. IANA will publish a report at a later date.
ICANN took over the ccTLD, .lb, last July after the former registry was left in limbo following the sudden death of its founder and manager. It was only the second time ICANN had made itself a ccTLD’s “caretaker”.
The board also voted at the weekend to redelegate Cameroon’s .cm, best-known in the Anglophone world for enabling .com typos purely by existing, to Agence Nationale des Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication, the local technology ministry.
ICANN takes over country’s ccTLD after Hall of Famer’s death
ICANN has assumed temporary ownership of .lb, the ccTLD for Lebanon, after the death of the man who founded the registry and managed it for 30 years.
IANA, in an unprecedented move, has made itself the “caretaker” sponsor and admin contact for .lb, according to the official record, which changed on Thursday.
The Org replaces the American University in Beirut, which as the name suggests is an American-owned university in Beirut, as sponsor and Lebanese Domain Registry as the admin.
It appears that AUB has not been involved with running .lb for a few years, having terminated its relationship with LBDR in 2020, and has told IANA that it is no longer the ccTLD’s sponsor.
AUB’s disassociation with LBDR, which appears to have been quite acrimonious, forced the registry to move onto CoCCA’s managed registry platform, where it still sits today.
Nabil Bukhalid, LBDR’s founder and a member of ISOC’s Internet Hall of Fame, had been trying to secure a permanent home for .lb for years, according to a history of the domain on the registry’s web site.
But he died unexpectedly of a heart attack while on vacation in January this year, leaving Lebanon’s domain in a bit of a limbo.
Kim Davies, head of IANA, revealed in a letter posted today (pdf) that .lb has been managed by Bukhalid’s “associates” for the last six months.
He said ICANN has approved a new “caretaker” role for IANA, and that the designation “will signal that there is an extraordinary and temporary operational situation”.
“IANA will continue to work with Bukhalid’s known associates to ensure the ongoing operation of the domain, until such time as a qualified successor is identified through a normal ccTLD transfer request process, at which time the caretaker designation will be removed,” he wrote.
.lb is believed to have fewer than 5,000 domains under management.
Bukhalid’s struggle to secure a successor played out against the backdrop of a Lebanese government that has far more important things to worry about. The country has been in a deep financial crisis since 2019, a situation exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, a revolution, and one of the largest accidental non-nuclear explosions in human history.
The economic crisis was such that Bukhalid was forced to incorporate LBDR in Delaware a couple years back.
“We are establishing this designation out of an operational necessity. There appear to be no specific policies that govern a situation where the existing designated ccTLD manager no longer performs its role but there is no obvious successor,” Davies wrote.
He suggested that the ccNSO may want to consider creating a policy for this kind of scenario.
Similar situations could occur in future, I reckon, if increasingly grey and wrinkly Postel-era “Just Some Guy” ccTLD sponsors don’t make arrangements for their heirs.
Davies said in his letter that the “caretaker” designation has been used once before, for Libya’s .ly in 2004. But it’s the first time IANA has been a caretaker, and the Libya experiment went spectacularly badly.
Belarusian domains to change hands
The two ccTLDs representing the sanctioned nation of Belarus are to change hands ahead of next week’s public ICANN meeting in The Hague.
According to the agenda of the ICANN board’s June 12 pre-meeting session, both .by and the Cyrillic equivalent .бел will be transferred to a Minsk company called Belarusian Cloud Technologies.
Currently, the IANA records show a company called Reliable Software has been the registry manager since 2012, but according to the registry’s web site, Belarusian Cloud Technologies has been running the two TLDs since the start of 2022.
It seems asking ICANN’s permission may have been an afterthought, or the redelegation process is taking longer than expected.
Belarus is of course quite heavily sanctioned by much of the world right now, including ICANN’s native US, due to its support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
But ICANN deals with sanctioned nations’ ccTLDs all the time. Where it requires special permission from the US government, it reliably obtains it.
As .gov changes hands, would Verisign run it for free?
The .gov top-level domain is moving for the first time since 1997, and the new owner is promising some pricing changes from next year.
The US General Services Administration has been running .gov, one of the original gTLDs, for almost a quarter-century, but next month it will be taken over by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
No changes have been made at IANA yet, but CISA is talking of the handover as if it is a done deal.
It will be the first time ICANN has been asked to redelegate what is essentially an uncontracted gTLD with some of the characteristics of a ccTLD. To be honest, I’ve no idea what rules even apply here.
The move was mandated by the DOTGOV Act of 2019, which was incorporated in a recently passed US spending bill.
Legislators wanted to improve .gov’s usefulness by increasing its public profile and security.
The bill was quite adamant that .gov domains should be priced at “no cost or a negligible cost”, but there’s a catch — Verisign runs the technical infrastructure for the domain, and currently charges $400 per domain per year.
According to CISA, “The way .gov domains are priced is tied closely with the service contract to operate the TLD, and change in the price of a domain is not expected until next year.”
So we’re looking at either a contract renegotiation or a rebid.
Frankly, given the really rather generous money-printing machine the US government has granted Verisign with its perpetual right to run .com and increase its profit margins in most years, it seems to me the company should be running it for free.
The .gov zone currently has domains measured in the low thousand.
Island demands return of its “naked” ccTLD
The Pacific island nation of Niue is loudly demanding that ICANN hand over control of its ccTLD, .nu, after two decades of bitter argument.
The government has taken the highly unusual move of filing a redelegation request with ICANN’s IANA unit publicly, forwarding it to other governments and the media.
The request is backed by UNR, the former Uniregistry, which is being put forward as the proposed back-end provider.
Niue claims, as it has since at least 2000, that the string was misappropriated by an American entrepreneur in the 1990s and has been used to generate tens of millions of dollars in revenue, with almost no benefit to the country.
The word “nu” is Swedish for “now”. It’s also the masculine form of “naked” in French, which enables lazy reporters to write click-baity headlines.
The Swedish meaning was first spotted by Massachusetts-based Bill Semich in 1997. Together with Niue-based Kiwi ex-pat Stafford Guest, he obtained the delegation for .nu from pre-ICANN root zone supremo Jon Postel.
They used the name Internet Users Society Niue (IUSN) and started selling .nu names to Swedes as a meaningful alternative to .se and .com.
As of today, there are about 264,000 registered .nu names, retailing for about $30 a year. Pre-2018 data is not available, but a couple of years ago, it had over 500,000 names under management.
That kind of money would be incredibly useful to Niue, which has a population of under 2,000 and few other natural resources to speak of. The country relies on hand-outs from New Zealand and, historically, dubious offshore banking schemes and the sale of postage stamps to collectors.
The government has said in the past that .nu cash would enable it to boost its internet infrastructure, thereby boosting its attractiveness as a tourist destination.
IUSN and Niue signed a memorandum of understanding in 1999, but a year later the government passed a law decreeing “.nu is a National resource for which the prime
authority is the Government of Niue”.
It’s been trying to get control of .nu ever since, but IUSN has consistently refused to recognize this law, Niue has always claimed, and has always refused to cooperate in a redelegation.
The company made headlines back in 2003 for claiming that it was rolling out free nationwide Wi-Fi in Niue, but there are serious questions about whether that ever actually happened.
Now, Niue claims:
The Wi-Fi has been continuously unstable and exceedingly limited. As of today, the ccTLD.NU administration and local presence of the IUSN in Niue consists of a motel with a PO Box and the Wi-Fi is covering a [n]egligible are[a] surrounding the motel. There is no operational management of the ccTLD.NU by the IUSN present in Niue.
I believe the motel in question is Coral Gardens, north of capital Alofi, which is or was run by Guest.
While IUSN is still the official ccTLD manager for .nu, according to IANA records, the business operations and technical back-end were transferred to Swedish ccTLD manager IIS in 2013.
IIS agreed to pay IUSN a minimum of $14.7 million over 15 years for the license to .nu, but the domain remains delegated to IUSN.
Niue, represented by its Swedish special envoy Pär Brumark (who until recently was also vice-chair of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee, representing Niue) sued IIS in late 2018 in an attempt to gain control of the ccTLD.
The government argues that under Swedish control, profits from .nu can only be earmarked for the development of the Swedish internet, at the expense of Niue.
Brumark tells us the case is currently being delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The problem Niue has now is pretty much the same as it always has been — IANA rules state that the losing party in a redelegation has to consent to the change of control, and IUSN really has no incentive to do so.
Niue’s best chance appears to be either the Swedish lawsuit or the possibility that it can get the GAC on board to support its request.
In-progress redelegation requests are also exempt by convention from ICANN’s transparency rules, so we’re not going to hear anything other than what Niue releases or the GAC can publicly squeeze out of ICANN leadership.
You can read the redelegation request (pdf) here.
GoDaddy could lose control of .co this week
It looks like GoDaddy’s recently acquired .co registry could lose formal control of the ccTLD this week.
ICANN’s board of directors has “Transfer of the .CO (Colombia) top-level domain to the Ministry of Information and Communications Technologies” on its agenda for its meeting this Thursday.
Since 2009, IANA record for .co shows the Colombian company .CO Internet as the sponsor, admin contact and tech contact.
.CO Internet was acquired by Neustar for $109 million in 2014. Neustar’s registry business, including the .co contract, was acquired by GoDaddy earlier this year. Most of .CO Internet’s original staff are still with the company.
GoDaddy now has the contract to run .co for the next five years, but as a service provider rather than having full administrative control of the TLD.
A redelegation to the Colombian ministry will not affect that contract, and in fact seems to have been envisaged by it.
Back in April when the renewal was announced, MinTIC said it would in future “be in charge of its [.co’s] administration through a group dedicated to Internet governance with technical personnel with knowledge and ability to manage and administer the domain”.
The new deal also sees Colombia receive 81% of the profits from .co, compared to the 6-7% it received under the old deal.
Assuming the ICANN board gives the redelegation the nod this week, it usually only takes IANA a day or two to make the appropriate updates to its registry.
Neustar’s .co contract up for grabs
Colombia is looking for a registry operator for its .co ccTLD.
If you’re interested, and you’re reading this before noon on Wednesday November 6 and you’re at ICANN 66 in Montreal, hightail it to room 514A for a presentation from the Colombian government that will be more informative than this blog post.
Hurry! Come on! Move it!
The Ministry of Information Technology and Communications (MinTIC) has published a set of documents describing some of the plan to find a potentially new home for .co.
There doesn’t appear to be a formal RFP yet, but I gather one is imminent.
What the documents do tell us is that Neustar’s contract to run .co expires in February, and that MinTIC is looking into the possibility of a successor registry.
Currently, .co is delegated to .CO Internet, a Colombian entity that relaunched the TLD in 2010 and was acquired by Neustar for $109 million in 2014.
But under a law passed earlier this year, it appears as if MinTIC is taking over policy management for .co and may therefore seek IANA redelegation.
There’s no indication I could see that there’s a plan to reverse the policy of allowing anyone anywhere in the world to register a .co, indeed MinTIC seems quite proud of its international success.
The documents also give us the first glimpse for years into .co’s growth.
It had 2,374,430 names under management in September, after a couple of years of slowing growth. The documents state that .co had an average of 323,590 new regs per year for the first seven years, which has since declined to an average of 32,396.
.co is not the cheapest TLD out there, renewing at around $25 at the low end.
Mystery .vu registry revealed
Neustar has been selected as the back-end domain registry operator for the nation of Vanuatu.
The company, and the Telecommunications Radiocommunications and Broadcasting Regulator, announced the appointment, which came after a competitive tender process between nine competing back-end providers, last night.
The ccTLD is .vu.
It’s unrestricted, with no local presence requirements, and currently costs $50 per year if you buy directly from the registry, Telecom Vanuatu Ltd (TVL).
Unusually, if you show up at TVL’s office in Vanuatu capital Port Vila, you can buy a domain for cash. I’ve never heard of that kind of “retail” domain name option before.
A handful of international registrars also sell the domains marked up, generally to over the $80 mark.
TVL was originally the sponsor of the ccTLD, but ICANN redelegated it to TRBR in March after Vanuatu’s government passed a law in 2016 calling for redelegation.
Under the deal, Neustar will take over the registry function from TVL after its 24 years in charge, bringing the .vu option to hundreds of other registrars.
Most registrars are already plugged in to Neustar, due to its operation of .us, .biz and .co. It also recently took over India’s .in.
There’s no public data on the number of domains under management, but Vanuatu is likely to have a much smaller footprint that Neustar’s main ccTLD clients.
It’s quite a young country, gaining independence from France and the UK in 1980, a Pacific archipelago of roughly 272,000 people.
Neustar expects the transition to its back-end to be completed September 30.
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