Nikhef in Amsterdam.

Both are good options.

SMIME will also get an ACME standard for issuing. Including a handful of CAs that will likely issue free Certificates for it.

My guess is that noting will happen for now. It’s mostly a decision that ICANN working groups have to figure out. But given the current size of the .io zone and that we already have a non existing cctld (.su for Soviet Unite), I’m pretty confident it will exist in the mid-term future.

IMO what will probably happen is that ICANN "promotes" the zone to being yet another top-level non-country code domain like .biz or .horse etc. Which is effectively what it is now.

Edit to add:

I don't think the .su precedent is applicable here. The Soviet Union was an internationally recognised state with a population, military, Montevideo Convention duties, seat at the UN, etc. The BIOT was and is nothing like that.

Sure, there's a lot of evidence that they were "terra nullius" before being claimed for the British empire. But the Chagos archipelago was inhabited utill its population was compulsorily expelled in the mid twentieth century.

I was surprised to discover that Ascension even has a ccTLD. I guess I assumed that the population was wholly military.

That's because it was created by the same guy who created .io and .sh - British DNS "pioneer" Paul Kane, who clearly had a passion for finding remaining corners of the British Empire that could "claim" a bit of internet land (for his own profit).

ICANN will act in whatever manner causes them the least trouble, which will be to retain the status quo. They have absolutely no incentive to behave otherwise.

It's pretty detrimental to relationships when one side pre-declares their rules and policies, and then arbitrarily decides to ignore them.

I'd say they have a lot of incentive to behave in whatever way their published policies state, regardless of the impact to users of the cctld.

(I don't know what the policies are)

Before the retirement of .yu, Slovenia wanted to hold on to it, but it was not the successor state of Yugoslavia so they had to relinquish control and pass it to Serbia. So going by that logic, it would not stay in the UK (for long).

It’s like if Guantanamo Bay had its own ccTLD.

The land will go to Mauritius, the legal entity of British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist (presumably).

Mauritius could decide to incorporate it as "Mauritius Indian Ocean Territory", hence maintaining the CC. I expect .io owners will likely suggest something like that, while showing them how much money they could get from a 10-15% deal similar to what Tuvalu has for .tv. Nobody likes to burn money.

I agree with you though, there doesn't seem to be a strong rule for this kind of thing and all interested parties would likely prefer for .io to continue to exist, so it will continue to exist, probably under Mauritius's ownership.

[0] https://snapshot.internetx.com/en/these-tlds-do-not-exist-an...

They have their own internal security team, that handles activation on a case by case basis. Some users need to verify at the beginning, some after a week and other do not have to verify at all.

As you can imagine, at that price point, people will abuse the sh* out of the platform. From public posts it lookalike the main indicators are: - country you provided - IP based Country - Payment method - Payment method returned country - order size - order pattern (something like spawn a server, abuse stuff, order new OR many servers at the beginning)

Sadly you just need to wait. I wish they would have other solutions. But for now that’s it :-/

I get that they want to avoid abuse, but this whole random verification thing is frustrating for legit users.

They should really consider a smoother, more consistent system to keep people happy without sacrificing security

But yes a smother signup, potentially coupled with a prepaid credit (via 3-D Secure) and or eID would be the easiest and safest solution for everyone.

Atleast if it’s clearly stated how and why that is required.

There are even some open source implementations for the backends.

Most expensive points are the required employees and the signup fees (and prepaid) for other registry’s like .xyz

Email Infrastructure (for renewal etc.) can be acquired over different services like postmark.

Validation of contact data can be expensive too. However maybe something like nominatim could do the trick.

Another thing is infrastructure for Whois/RDAP.

Then you need standard things like Whois privacy (there is a document by icann for requirements).

e.g. example.new should forward to a website that allowed to create examples?