You Don't Own Your .io or .ai. You Rent a Country's Politics

speckx 37 points 13 comments July 06, 2026
webhosting.today · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (6 comments)

tracker1

All domains are pretty much rented... I know it's more fragile with cc-tld's but really, given the corporate interests behind other TLDs and the use of trademarks to re-settle established lands, so to speak... I wouldn't trust any domain to always exist. That said, despite it being in a position where it would have normally disappeared, I don't think .io is going anywhere... there's way too much interest in keeping it around. I'd go so far as to suggest that maybe it should become "not" a "cc-tld" despite it being two characters and having it's origins in a national definition.

tliltocatl

Same applies for .com/.net, except it's USA's politics. Which you may or may not consider more reliable. But yea, ccTLD domain hacks are pretty damn stupid.

Bender

Nobody owns a domain of any TLD otherwise they would only pay for it once and it would be theirs forever assuming they are not violating trademarks.

thebeardisred

This was why, despite quite a few of us enjoying the gag, we gave up the domain `libcore.so` at CoreOS many, many years ago. Too much of a supply chain risk.

andreashaerter

On topic when draw.io (diagrams.net) realized that, from https://www.drawio.com/blog/move-diagrams-net/#io-domains There are two major problems with .io domains: The first is that the islands which should own the domain suffix, don't, thanks to a wonderful piece of modern day British Imperialism. If you ever feel the need to donate to us, please give it to a more worthy cause. Secondly, there was a security issue with the .io domain. In 2017, a researcher managed to take control of four of the seven authoritative name servers for the .io domain. We accept that mistakes can happen, strong processes limit the chances of them happening, but they still can.

niemandhier

Choose the country domain the matches your citizenship. Most countries protect their own much better than foreigners!

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
14,015 stories · 131,331 chunks indexed