It's possible that the .io cctld is going to go away [0]. Does crates.io have a backup plan at all? Does anyone know what problems it would end up causing?

I imagine the package registry having to move domains is going to cause a ton of problems.

Frankly, it's concerning to me that so much of the Rust ecosystem has chosen to standardize on shaky ccTLDs. The Indian Ocean Territory (.io) is a small island territory whose only inhabitants are a single military base, it is crazy to use that domain for something important. Serbia (.rs) is more stable, but they could still cut off access for non-Serbians if they wanted to.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io#Phasing_Out

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[–] Rogue@feddit.uk 8 points 4 weeks ago (6 children)

It's more bizarre that a single organisation would have such tight control over the Internet. Assigning a tld to each country is a good way to appease each country and give them autonomy over their own portion

[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 2 points 4 weeks ago (5 children)

But do they actually have autonomy, give that random companies can use .io and .ai? Or did the British Indian Ocean Territory and Anguilla approve all such uses of those domains?

[–] Rogue@feddit.uk 6 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Yep. The governments typically select who administers the tld and then get a lump sum or portion of the revenues.

For .ai it was 10% of their GDP in 2023 which is insane...

The registration fees earned from the .ai domains go to the treasury of Government of Anguilla. As per a New York Times report, in 2018, the total revenue generated out of selling .ai domains was $2.9 million.[13][14]

In 2023, Anguilla’s government made about US$32 million from fees collected for registering .ai domains. That amounted to more than 10% of gross domestic product for the territory.[

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ai

[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 3 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

Wow, I definitely should have google that myself before asking, but thank you for explaining and calling out that data point.

I honestly think that shows that it was in fact a bad idea to assign TLDs to countries. Having a country code acronym with a popular tech meaning is essentially just luck of the draw, so they've basically just arbitrarily given a few small countries a valuable resource to sell. I guess that benefits those countries, but I doubt "quasi-random fundraising for small countries" was ever the intent.

[–] Rogue@feddit.uk 2 points 4 weeks ago

They are just iso country codes though, so it is just the luck that some have become so popular.

Some countries are pretty strict that their tlds must be local or at least provide translation in the regional language. The cook islands for instance have prime opportunity with .co.ck but they refuse the to let people take advantage

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