Comment by al_borland 2 days ago
If you're going to buy a domain for this, don't get fancy with the TLD. I made the mistake of choosing a .io domain for this purpose and with the future of the TLD uncertain, I have been moving away from it, so I'm not left in a bad spot if things go sideways.
.io is the ccTLD for Chagos Islands.
UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius.
There is a mixed history of what happens to the ccTLD in such cases.
The British Indian Ocean Territories (.io) might go to control of Mauritius. They will be able to decide what to do with the TLD. It could in principle be restricted to residents, or go away entirely.
> It could in principle be restricted to residents, or go away entirely.
If the UK loses control of it, I'd put most of my betting money on Option 3: The new owners extort everyone with a .io domain for a rate proportional to the perceived value. In other words, $50K a year for a successful tech company, $1000 a year for the average joe who doesn't want to lose control of a domain tied to 1,000 accounts.
I bought the tombert.com domain about eleven years ago, forgot to renew it, GoDaddy auctioned it off and a squatter sat on it, and they wanted $1800 for it back, which of course I wasn't going to pay for my dumb internet alias. I tried calling the squatter and offered to pay them $200, and they said that maybe they could setting for $1000, but this domain is in "really high demand" so they can't go lower than that.
I would occasionally check it, and the price would vary by hundreds of dollars, but never a price I was willing to pay. Eventually I think it lapsed again and was picked up by some Chinese site that (I think) was trying to sell massages.
Finally, in 2021, I guess they got tired of paying for it, and it fully lapsed, and I was able to purchase it, so I bought it for ten years.
Never go for ccTLDs for anything critical, since you're practically at the whims of the government controlling it (see: .af ccTLD that the Taliban took over)