It’s possible that the .io cctld is going to go away [0]. Does crates.io have a backup plan at all? Does anyone know what problems it would end up causing?

I imagine the package registry having to move domains is going to cause a ton of problems.

Frankly, it’s concerning to me that so much of the Rust ecosystem has chosen to standardize on shaky ccTLDs. The Indian Ocean Territory (.io) is a small island territory whose only inhabitants are a single military base, it is crazy to use that domain for something important. Serbia (.rs) is more stable, but they could still cut off access for non-Serbians if they wanted to.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io#Phasing_Out

  • BatmanAoD@programming.dev
    51·
    17 hours ago

    Obviously this isn’t specific to Rust, but frankly it’s bizarre to me that ICANN chose to tie top-level domains to country codes in the first place. Languages might have made sense, but a major feature of the internet is that it’s less beholden to political boundaries than most of the physical world is.

    • Rogue
      4·
      12 hours ago

      It’s more bizarre that a single organisation would have such tight control over the Internet. Assigning a tld to each country is a good way to appease each country and give them autonomy over their own portion

      • BatmanAoD@programming.dev
        1·
        8 hours ago

        But do they actually have autonomy, give that random companies can use .io and .ai? Or did the British Indian Ocean Territory and Anguilla approve all such uses of those domains?

        • Flipper@feddit.org
          2·
          6 hours ago

          There are several cctld where the entity buying the domain needs to be a local. EU is an example for that. De requires you to be able appoint a representative within 2 weeks living in Germany.

        • Rogue
          2·
          7 hours ago

          Yep. The governments typically select who administers the tld and then get a lump sum or portion of the revenues.

          For .ai it was 10% of their GDP in 2023 which is insane…

          The registration fees earned from the .ai domains go to the treasury of Government of Anguilla. As per a New York Times report, in 2018, the total revenue generated out of selling .ai domains was $2.9 million.[13][14]

          In 2023, Anguilla’s government made about US$32 million from fees collected for registering .ai domains. That amounted to more than 10% of gross domestic product for the territory.[

          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ai

    • jeff 👨‍💻@programming.devEnglish
      4·
      15 hours ago

      It makes a lot of sense for businesses, especially where different countries might have different regulations. E.g., amazon.ca and amazon.in. Both sites are in English but it makes way more sense to split them up by country.