It should eventually get removed by ICANN, since the country code TLDs are managed by ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 (it's however not an exact match), and the transfer will mean the British Indian Ocean Territories will no longer exist. ISO is going to be the entity in charge of removing the io country code, which it probably will do since ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 isn't just used for domain names. There's a standardized process for this; from the top of my head, you'll have 3-5 years before the TLD fully vanishes and for current domains to expire. (Also, because it's a country code, certain protections you're supposed to have as a domain owner won't apply to you; ICANN basically gives up underlying management of the ccTLD space to the countries that own them, meaning anything you're given is at the grace of the country owning them - this applies for all ccTLDs, which is why some UK domain owners suddenly lost control over their .eu domains when Brexit happened.)

It's not the first time a TLD has been removed; a couple of TLDs have been scrapped in the past when countries split up or got merged (chiefly in the aftermath of the cold war)[0]. For the most part, those domain names weren't in heavy use. There's also a few high-profile failures of removal: .uk was used instead of .gb in the early days of the internet before 2-letter codes were standardized to ISO, which is why the UK uses .uk instead of .gb (an attempt to scrap .uk was attempted, but failed almost immediately). .su also should have been scrapped ages ago, but because the Russian entity that manages it refuses to cooperate with ICANN, the TLD is still in use, from what I can tell just because they don't want to risk breaking the internet.

The .su TLD is the one with the closest amount of use as the .io TLD has today. That said, it's unlikely that the entity currently managing .io (a hedge fund if I'm not mistaken) has the legal muscle to force ICANN to keep it in the list, the way the Russian domain name registrar has been able to.

[0]: See a more detailed explanation here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain#...

> That said, it's unlikely that the entity currently managing .io (a hedge fund if I'm not mistaken) has the legal muscle to force ICANN to keep it in the list

ICANN periodically lets anyone with $1 million create random new generic TLDs like .top and .win and .google and .hiv and .amazon and .zip - it's pretty clear there aren't any real rules or standards for TLDs apart from having money.

Why should ICANN break things for .io and its users, when they could instead keep things working, and extract $1M from a hedge fund, at the same time?

Am I the only one who sees no upside whatsoever in sunsetting a well-established, widely used, reasonably operated TLD?

To my mind, the only reason to unregister a TLD would be the TLD falling into disuse (the registrar having gone incomunicado, too-level DNS servers unmaintained, etc), and nobody agreeing to pick it up at the price of a new TLD ($1M?).

There is a lot of money to be made from the .io domain. My guess is that it will continue to exist as some kind of gTLD. Google already treats it like that.

Why is not using .gb a mistake? The official name of the country is The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - Great Britain is the island containing England, Scotland and Wales. The UK also contains Northern Ireland. It would be nonsensical (technically) for Northern Irish businesses to have domains ending in .gb

> It should eventually get removed by ICANN, since the country code TLDs are managed by ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 (it's however not an exact match), and the transfer will mean the British Indian Ocean Territories will no longer exist. ISO is going to be the entity in charge of removing the io country code, which it probably will do since ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 isn't just used for domain names.

Side note: I suspect the real reason Google wants to discontinue goo.gl links is because they believe Trump will eventually succeed in annexing Greenland to the US.