Couldn’t they just move .io to a different category?
Specifically the issue is that two letter TLDs are reserved exclusively for countries/governments. So far only one exception has been made to this rule, .su for the Soviet Union. So another exemption is certainly possible.
It is weird to imagine a world in which glasnost kept the union together and we have active .su domains around. I imagine they’d be less suspicious than .ru in our timeline but not a lot less
Specifically the issue is that two letter TLDs are reserved exclusively for countries/governments. So far only one exception has been made to this rule, .su for the Soviet Union. So another exemption is certainly possible.
Meh. There’s also .UK, which is not the country code for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland… that’s GB.
We also have .EU, so this stuff is all pretty flexible in some sense.
As I understand it, the .su was not really an intentional exception as much as it happened before the strict rules were written down.
.su isn’t an exception. The rule was created so the .su situation doesn’t happen again.
It is weird to imagine a world in which glasnost kept the union together and we have active .su domains around. I imagine they’d be less suspicious than .ru in our timeline but not a lot less