Mitigating unforeseen service disruption with a dotBrand TLD application

With approximately 18 months to go until the opening of the next new gTLD application round, the geopolitical situation involving the British Indian Ocean Territory has seen a compelling reason develop for organisations to consider the merits of applying for their own dotBrand.

The uncertain future of the .IO ccTLD

In early October, the United Kingdom Government made the surprise, and controversial announcement that it was giving up sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. The islands, also known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, are located in the middle of the Indian Ocean and may seem an unlikely spot to make headline news, but they are perhaps unique in a number of ways. The main island, Diego Garcia, has been the location of a relatively secret joint UK-US military base since the 1970s and will remain a military installation for at least 99 more years under the new agreement proposed by the UK Government.

Whilst the military base may have been the main reason why the islands had gained recognition, in the last few years, the popularity of the  .IO Top Level Domain has brought prominence to the British Indian Ocean Territory, with its use initially driven by the developer community as a moniker for the tech community phrase “In/Out.”  Google were one of the first global brands to start using a .IO domain, as far back as 2008, with the TLD today having over 1.5 million names registered, including active domains such as OpenSea.io, Guthub.io and Webflow.io.

The concern raised by the UK Government’s decision to give the sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius potentially could put the future of the .IO TLD, and those 1.5 million domain names at risk. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), part of ICANN since 2016,  aligns ccTLDs to the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code. Whilst the British Indian Ocean Territory uses .IO, Mauritius utilises the .MU two-character code. Will this mean a goodbye to .IO? It is too early to tell, but any organisation that is currently utilising a .IO TLD, especially as a core domain name, may want to start thinking about a plan B just in case.

The impact of geopolitical events on ccTLDs

The good news is this will not be an overnight decision. There have been examples of ccTLDs being sun-setted, or eligibility criteria changing in the past, and whilst some domain name owners will have ignored warnings to take action, on the most part changes are made without incident. The TLD is owned by Identity Digital, one of the largest and most respected TLD registry operators in the world, who will likely have a major say in any future directional decisions.

Changes to TLD eligibility happens from time to time. For instance, in January 2022, as a result of Brexit, approximately 48,000 .EU domain names registered by United Kingdom entities and individuals were undelegated because the UK ceased to be part of the European Union, and the domain registrants had not complied with numerous requests over a two-year period to update their domain names with EU-based contacts.

In 1992, the .YU ccTLD was closed to all new registrants, with the breakup of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, with IANA creating new ccTLDs for the new states including Croatia, Slovenia, and Serbia. IANA had to deal with similar ccTLD situations when the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia broke up. Interestingly, the former Soviet Union ccTLD is still live and there are numerous active websites operating with a .SU domain name. Another notable example of changes in political events  on domain names was with Zaire and the .ZR ccTLD which was phased out from 1997, finally being deleted by IANA in 2001, with all of the domain names being transferred to the .CD zone, the ISO 3166-1 alpha code for the Democratic Republic of Congo, the restored name for the country of Zaire.

The Lift and Shift Proposition for dotBrand TLD owners

In 2026, the second application round of the new gTLD programme is due to begin and many organisations will look to secure their own dotBrand Top-Level Domain. One solution that has been adopted by a number of dotBrand applicants from the first round is that of a “lift and shift” strategy. Because the dotBrand holder has complete control over the registration and delegation of domain names, they can react rapidly to changes in local and global geopolitical conditions, deploying new web addresses and URLs that can mitigate against unexpected disruptions in service within a few minutes.

The concept of being able to “lift” the traffic to a website from one non-resolving domain name, and “shift” it to a new TLD with immediate effect is a fundamental advantage of using a dotBrand. Whilst situations such as those that could impact the .IO ccTLD are very few and far between, owning a dotBrand insulates an organisation from the risk of a situation happening to them, whether that is through political decisions such as with .IO, regional conflicts like those happening in Ukraine or the Middle East, or even natural disruption such as a hurricane destroying local infrastructure, something we saw occur with Hurricane Irma impacting the .AI ccTLD in 2017.

If any of the ccTLDs a brand owns and uses is disrupted in any way, traffic can be diverted to the dotBrand URL quickly and without impacting the customer experience. For organisations that have localised websites, whether to address specific geographic markets or for compliance purposes, having web pages built under the dotBrand (for instance IO.ABC) as well as on the ccTLDs (ABC.IO) is a simple, but effective way not only to provide continuity but also over time, provide the platform to migrate content across to the dotBrand.

Summary

Whatever the future holds for the .IO ccTLD and registrants, the opportunity for organisations to take advantage being able to apply for a dotBrand should be considered carefully. Situations like those surrounding .IO are very rare, but when they do occur, it can undermine years of building an online brand. Physical history is never as separate from our digital future as we like to think.