David Barnett's Brand Protection Articles: io, io: Off the web we go?

by David Barnett and Richard Ferguson

Overview

Following the news at the start of October of the UK's announcement of a transfer of sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius^[1], we consider the implications for the well-known .io domain name extension, or top-level domain (TLD), which is associated with the group of islands in the context of the British Indian Ocean Territory.

Background

.io is an example of a country-code TLD (ccTLD) which has been extensively 'repurposed' for more general use, and has proven particularly popular with technology companies (nominally in reference to 'input / output', Internet of Things, or binary code ('1 / 0')). Other examples of ccTLDs which have also seen alternative use include .ai (in reference to artificial intelligence), .tv (for television and streaming services), and .co (for general use for company websites). Such repurposing has proven popular over recent years, in view of the increasing shortage of availability of short, memorable domain names across the popular legacy extensions such as .com^[2].

Some of the most well-known .io domains host very popular and high-traffic websites, with familiar examples including OpenSea.io, EtherScan.io, Synthesia.io, Github.io, Bitbucket.io, Ghost.io, ReadTheDocs.io, Sentry.io, and Itch.io^[3,4].

The issue is that, when the political changes to the Chagos Islands are formalised, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist as a country, meaning that the International Standard for Organization (ISO) will remove the IO country code from its specification, and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) will disallow any further .io registrations. There is likely also to begin a process of 'retiring' existing domains, potentially with significant implications to any legacy websites, which are likely to have to migrate to alternative extensions. Similar situations have arisen with other legacy country extensions such as .su (Soviet Union) and .yu (Yugoslavia), though there has been a lack of consistency in the way in which these older extensions have been handled, due to the absence of any formalised process at the respective times^[5].

Analysis

Registrations

As a ccTLD, which is not obligated to publish a zone-file of all registered domains, the actual number of .io domains currently registered is not publicly exactly known, and no comprehensive list is available. DomainTools suggests^[6] that the number is currently around 1.06 million, but many of the best sources of actual data fall some way short of this. Nevertheless, zonefiles.io (for example) provides a database of nearly 176k .io domains (excluding third- and higher-level domain names), giving a sample which offers a reasonable insight to overall trends in the .io landscape.

Within this sample dataset, the registered domains range in (second-level domain name, or SLD) length from 1 (17 instances) to 38 characters (1 instance; xn--kasinotilmanrekisteritymist-1kc82c.io, actually a domain written in Punycode format (a way of encoding names featuring non-Latin characters), which is decoded as kasinotilmanrekisteröitymistä.io), with a peak in numbers at a length of 8 characters (almost 23k instances) (see Figure 1). The large numbers of relatively short domains show that perhaps part of the appeal of this extension to brand owners has been the possibility to register names which were perhaps not available on other legacy extensions.

Figure 1: Distribution of second-level domain name (SLD) length in characters, for the sample of .io domains provided by zonefiles.io

Disputes

.io's potential retirement is also noteworthy from a disputes perspective, with WIPO only taking over from the National Arbitration Forum (NAF) to handle complaints in June 2020 via a modified version of the UDRP^[7]. Since this time, almost 200 such disputes have been submitted^[8], with details of the individual cases available through the WIPO website^{[9,10,11,12,13]} and including examples pertaining to the likes of AirBnB, Shopify and Redbull.

Conclusion

The roadmap for deprecating .io domains, and the timescale over which it will take effect, is still somewhat unclear - though it appears the process will extend over at least a five-year period^[14]. However, the tale of the IO country code offers a cautionary warning to brand owners about the reliance of certain characteristics of Internet infrastructure on external and geopolitical events, and the danger of putting all of your eggs in one basket from a domain extension point of view.

The endeavour of migrating a primary website presence to an alternative name can be an extensive one, requiring rebranding, modifications to potentially high volumes of technical infrastructure, and potentially a rebuild of search-engine ranking and keyword strategies. The potential deprecation of the .io extension therefore raises the possibility of significant implications and disruption for brands who have adopted it. Indeed, some brand owners embarking on the name-clearing process may even have factored in and specifically settled for brand names where the .io extension was available, especially those in the technology space.

Moves to alternative extensions may be unavoidable and, as such, it may be advisable for brands to get ahead of the game by acquiring a range of alternative options (whilst still available) as part of a domain portfolio strategy, and perhaps considering a wholesale move to a dot-brand extension, in light of the new round of applications set to launch in 2026^[15].

References

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98ynejg4l5o

[2] https://www.iamstobbs.com/availability-of-domains-ebook

[3] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/top-ranking-websites-io-extension-brandfuldomains/

[4] https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/tld-io-

[5] https://every.to/p/the-disappearance-of-an-internet-domain

[6] https://research.domaintools.com/statistics/tld-counts/

[7] https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/cctld/io/index.html

[8] https://www.udrpsearch.com/search?query=.io&search=domain

[9] https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/casesx/list.jsp?prefix=DIO&year=2020&seq_min=1&seq_max=199

[10] https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/casesx/list.jsp?prefix=DIO&year=2021&seq_min=1&seq_max=199

[11] https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/casesx/list.jsp?prefix=DIO&year=2022&seq_min=1&seq_max=199