> 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.

There's actually a bunch of rules gTLDs have to follow compared to ccTLDs. The main one I know of is that they can't randomly screw you over if you've already registered a domain name with them - they're allowed to force conditions on initial signups, but they are required to respond to things like trademark disputes in the ICANN process or domain name registrar transfers (if you ever wondered why this is a relatively easy thing - it's because ICANN punishes registrars that don't cooperate).

Freenom got in a lot of trouble back in the day for not following the rules and got suspended+fined a few times by ICANN for gTLD registrations. It took a Facebook lawsuit for them to finally go under though.

> 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?

Because ccTLDs follow a different standard. ICANN makes no money from ccTLDs - they're given to the country that owns the territory in question (or whatever pseudo-legal authority comes closest), and the country then has the right to sublicense out the right to those TLDs under any conditions it wants to use. Some countries don't let you do top-level registrations or any registrations at all, reserving the entire space for government websites. Others make them basically open to registration by anyone. ICANN has no real financial ties for .io in specific; any money that the hedge fund pays for it goes to the British government.

This system as I understand it, is this way in part to appease countries that would otherwise have bad relationships with the US to accept ICANN as the central naming authority of the internet even though it's a US-based entity; 2 letter TLDs are given to the country in question and in exchange, they follow the other rules of ICANN.

Making an exception would basically require the UK to make a fuss about it (since that's what Russia did with .su), which seems unlikely given the UK is also changing the legal status of the British Indian Ocean Territories in such a way that they cease to exist.

> Because ccTLDs follow a different standard

They will just move .io from ccTLD to gTLD, with the UK government's blessing. Everyone realizes there is no point in stopping the money from flowing.