GM,
Last week, I was invited to Dubai to attend the OKX exchange event, and it was quite a fruitful experience. OKX went all out in flying various media outlets there to announce that they have obtained a regulatory license from the local government, officially setting up a regional headquarters in Dubai and launching AED (UAE Dirham) trading pairs.
However, as a tech person, what intrigued me the most wasn’t the regulatory business updates, but rather that OKX is preparing to integrate Zero Knowledge Proof 1technology into its wallet, introducing zkKYC, which brings personal credit onto the blockchain while ensuring user privacy. This was my first time hearing about the zkKYC concept, and after researching it, I found it incredibly fascinating. I will be sharing more insights from my trip and introducing this topic through upcoming articles and podcasts.
Additionally, Optimism recently announced the fifth wave of $OP token airdrops, which eligible users must actively claim. I missed out again this time, but to me, claiming token airdrops feels a bit like checking lottery tickets — as long as you’re frequently active on the blockchain, it’s like "spending," and your chances of winning naturally increase. Even if you don’t win, there’s no real loss.
Lastly, there are still 18 tickets available for this Saturday’s movie screening event. I encourage everyone to register quickly! After Thursday, I will close the free registration for members and open up paid registration for everyone else.
Now, onto the main topic. This article discusses the disappearing threat of .io domains. After reading it, you’ll realize just how fragile the URL system we take for granted really is — even a typhoon could potentially blow a URL away!
The God of the Internet
Have you ever seen a website URL that ends with .io?
Some media have pointed out that .io is the most popular domain suffix (top-level domain) used by web3 projects. At crypto conferences, more than half of the projects proudly display their .io domain. Blockchain explorer Etherscan, the layer-2 network Arbitrum, and NFT marketplace OpenSea have all chosen .io as their domain suffix. It’s not only concise and easy to remember but also carries technical significance, as I/O is shorthand for input/output in computing.
However, recently, there’s been news of a looming crisis for .io domains. In as little as five years, nearly 1.6 million .io websites worldwide may be forced to disappear, with the web3 space being particularly hard hit. The reason isn’t technical but political. The UK government recently announced it would relinquish sovereignty over a small island in the Indian Ocean, which could lead to the domain being delisted by international organizations. To understand how an obscure island could determine the fate of 1.6 million websites, we need to look back at the history of domain names.
Domain names are a key part of brand identity, and many companies are willing to spend big money on the right URL. But in the early days of the internet, domain naming was actually quite arbitrary, and the rules were determined by a U.S. university professor named Jon Postel. Wikipedia refers to him as the “God of the Internet,” because in many ways, he was doing the work of a god.
According to Taiwan Network Information Center:
Early internet pioneer and University of Southern California professor Jon Postel used the international standard ISO 3166 to assign country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). At that time, no government in the world participated in the naming process. In other words, Jon Postel, like a god of the internet, set the naming rules for each country, and these rules are still in use today. Without any legal basis, the .au domain representing Australia was directly authorized by Jon Postel in 1986 to Professor Robert Elz of the University of Melbourne. This was simply because Robert Elz was part of the American DNS architecture research team that Jon Postel knew.
The early internet was similar to the early days of blockchain. Most people were not online yet, and nobody really cared how Jon Postel assigned names. However, in hindsight, Jon Postel’s decision to allocate domain names based on countries had a profound impact on the future development of the internet.
Take the currently popular .ai domain as an example. Well-known productivity tools like Claude and Perplexity use .ai as their URL suffix. This domain is managed by the Caribbean island of Anguilla. In 2017, the island was hit by a typhoon that caused a massive power outage. Although all .ai websites around the world continued to function normally, the data center's power outage meant that ownership transfers of .ai domains could not take place. This made people realize that the domain name system is more fragile than they thought—something as simple as a typhoon could disrupt a domain!
The fact that domain names can be affected by the weather is surprising enough, but even geopolitics can influence the existence of website URLs. The focus of this article, the .io domain, has become the latest hot topic and may become the next casualty of international political conflicts.
The Domain Crisis
Who owns the Diaoyu Islands near Taiwan? Japan, China, and Taiwan all claim sovereignty, and none are willing to back down.
There’s a similar dispute in the Indian Ocean. The UK and the Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius have been locked in a long-standing sovereignty dispute over a small island—British Indian Ocean Territory. Last week, the British government announced that it would relinquish sovereignty over the island, a decision that immediately caused an uproar online.
According to media reports:
Every country and region in the world has its own domain code, which forms the foundation of the internet’s domain name system. For example, the United States uses the .us domain. The British Indian Ocean Territory, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean, manages the .io domain. However, the recent agreement between the UK and Mauritius to transfer sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius has cast uncertainty over the future of more than 1.6 million websites using the .io domain.
In theory, politics and technology are two separate matters that shouldn't affect one another. However, there is a clause in the regulations of ICANN, the international organization that manages global domains, which states that if a country or region is delisted from the ISO standards, its country domain must be deleted five years later. This rule ties politics and technology together, and on the surface, it seems reasonable—after all, if the country no longer exists, why should its domain name remain? But that’s just the simplest scenario.
In the past, many island nations made money by selling passports. Nowadays, the best business is selling domain names. The Caribbean island of Anguilla, which was assigned the .ai domain, has a land area only one-third the size of Taipei. Yet in 2023 alone, it earned approximately NT$1 billion (USD$32 million) from domain registration fees, accounting for 10% of its GDP.
When tech companies choose domain names today, the country is no longer a primary consideration. In other words, domain names are no longer used to identify which country a website belongs to. Notion.so is not based in Somalia, Bit.ly is not based in Libya, and OpenSea.io is not based in the British Indian Ocean Territory. However, if these domain-selling countries disappear, then according to ICANN’s rules, the companies using those domains would also lose their rights to them.
This situation is similar to a dispute between landlords and tenants. The UK is the "landlord" of the .io domain, while tech companies are the "tenants" renting the domain. Now that the landlord has decided to transfer ownership of the property, the tenants are worried about being left homeless. With 1.6 million websites using .io, this issue has drawn global attention. However, some argue online that there’s no need to worry, as there are precedents for this type of situation.
The Soviet Union dissolved over 30 years ago, but the .su domain from the former Soviet regime is still in use today. Why does .su still exist? ICANN's reasoning is that it preserves cultural diversity. While this explanation sounds noble, the reality is that ICANN likely refrained from deleting .su due to concerns about the negative impact it could have on the internet's development, leading them to avoid strict enforcement.
Since ICANN has set a precedent, some experts predict that ICANN will not take drastic action against the .io domain either. ICANN has many options and doesn’t need to be rigid in its approach. After all, rules are made by people, and enforcement can sometimes be flexible. A little leniency isn't a bad thing; ICANN could work to coordinate the transfer to the next “landlord” or once again invoke the reasoning of preserving cultural diversity to allow the .io domain to remain. However, such actions inevitably raise the question: if there are so many exceptions, doesn’t that render ICANN’s original rules meaningless?
This situation highlights how current domain management tends to rely more on human judgment than on the rule of law, in stark contrast to web3 domains, which are entirely managed by smart contracts.
Web3 Domains
The blockchain world also has its own domain system2. For example, Vitalik Buterin leased the domain vitalik.eth to represent his personal wallet address, and I have leased mnhsu.eth to represent mine. However, unlike traditional domains managed by international organizations, blockchain domains are entirely governed by code—smart contracts and the blockchain itself. People collectively decide on the rules of these smart contracts, and the blockchain executes them. If exceptions are to be made, they must be applied uniformly, without favoritism.
Is this system better? I won’t blindly endorse web3 domains. After all, most browsers today still cannot recognize web3 domains that end in .eth, and their function is quite different from traditional URLs. However, there are two aspects of domain management that are worth discussing:
Websites outlive nations
ICANN’s enforcement credibility
These days, no one is worried about the internet disappearing, but the same cannot be said about the longevity of nations. Tech companies have long since moved beyond geographic limitations when choosing domain names, proving that the rules set by the “God of the Internet” were somewhat unnecessary. Drawing borders on the internet is like drawing lines in the sand; over time, these artificial boundaries naturally fade away.
I believe that many blockchain supporters are not anti-government; rather, they understand that regimes change over time. They seek something more enduring than governments, which is why they place their hope in a blockchain run by people from all over the world. After all, the people are more resilient than governments.
ICANN was established in 1998, and while its members come from around the world, giving the appearance of impartiality, it may, in practice, be more of a paper tiger that fears offending anyone. This reveals the awkwardness of human intervention in internet governance. On one hand, ICANN should act according to its rules—no matter how important a website is, rules are rules. But on the other hand, ICANN has turned a blind eye to the survival of the .su domain, even justifying it under the pretext of "cultural diversity."
This is contradictory. If ICANN doesn’t intend to revise its rules, then the 1.6 million websites using .io domains may have to accept their fate and switch to a new URL while they still have time. But if ICANN is going to adopt a more "flexible" management approach, the question arises: What are ICANN’s standards for judgment, and where are its limits of power? The .io crisis has made these questions even more unclear.
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