2 Letter TLDs are always country codes (and ccTLDs are always 2 Letters long). So moving them to another category is technically possible, but unprecedented and improbable.
Couldn’t they just move .io to a different category?
Specifically the issue is that two letter TLDs are reserved exclusively for countries/governments. So far only one exception has been made to this rule, .su for the Soviet Union. So another exemption is certainly possible.
It is weird to imagine a world in which glasnost kept the union together and we have active .su domains around. I imagine they’d be less suspicious than .ru in our timeline but not a lot less
Couldn’t they just move .io to a different category? Or are TLDs never reused once they lose their original designation?
2 Letter TLDs are always country codes (and ccTLDs are always 2 Letters long). So moving them to another category is technically possible, but unprecedented and improbable.
Specifically the issue is that two letter TLDs are reserved exclusively for countries/governments. So far only one exception has been made to this rule, .su for the Soviet Union. So another exemption is certainly possible.
.su isn’t an exception. The rule was created so the .su situation doesn’t happen again.
It is weird to imagine a world in which glasnost kept the union together and we have active .su domains around. I imagine they’d be less suspicious than .ru in our timeline but not a lot less
As I understand it, the .su was not really an intentional exception as much as it happened before the strict rules were written down.
Meh. There’s also .UK, which is not the country code for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland… that’s GB.
We also have .EU, so this stuff is all pretty flexible in some sense.
They’re not just country codes, but match a list of two character country codes defined by the UN
Country codes are defined by the ISO, which is not UN run.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for_Standardization