insight ⋅ 2025

The future of .io domain names

Country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) are regional domains delegated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to trustees1. Eligibility for a ccTLD is determined by IANA based on the assignment of a country-code in the ISO 3166-1 standard2.

British Indian Ocean Territory

The British government formed the British Indian Ocean Territory in November 1965 from islands in the Chaos Archipelago. The International Organization for Standardization assigned the 2-letter io country-code to the British Indian Ocean Territory in the first edition of ISO 3166 (1974)3.

.io ccTLD

In 1997, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority delegated .io for the British Indian Ocean Territory to a private party. As of 2025, Identity Digital operates the .io ccTLD registry.

Popular for the meaning of io in computer science (input/output), over 1 million .io domains are registered4 and used by technology companies like Sentry.io⌝, Prismic.io⌝, Apollo.io⌝ and IPinfo.io⌝.

Retirement of .io

On 22 May 2025, following a decades-long sovereignty dispute, the British government agreed to dissolve the British Indian Ocean Territory and return the territory to Mauritius.

ccTLD eligibility is determined by the associated country or territory being assigned in the ISO 3166-1 standard. When countries or territories are removed from the standard, their eligibility expires, and they need to be retired from use after an orderly transition period.

When a ccTLD is no longer eligible, IANA will notify the ccTLD manager that the ccTLD is due for retirement. By default the ccTLD will be removed after five years. The ccTLD will be publicly advertised as under retirement with the target removal date5.

As of July 2025, the International Organization for Standardization is yet to announce when it will remove the British Indian Ocean Territory from the ISO 3166 standard.

What is next for .io domains?

We expect the .io retirement to occur in the early 2030s. Many companies using .io have already upgraded their domains to .com, including Intercom, Segment, ngrok and Radar6. For companies using .io today, getting ahead of the retirement will enable a seamless transition to a new domain by educating users and updating systems years before your domain stops working.

Get in touch via hello@g0t.com⌝ for expert insight and support with your transition from .io.

Footnotes

  1. Delegating or transferring a country-code top-level domain (ccTLD)⌝ ↩

  2. Qualifying top-level domain strings⌝ ↩

  3. Codes for the representation of names of countries — 1974-12-15⌝ ↩

  4. Domain registrations dynamics in .io zone⌝ ↩

  5. Retirement of a Country-code Top-level Domain (ccTLD)⌝ ↩

  6. intercom.io -> intercom.com, segment.io -> segment.com, ngrok.io -> ngrok.com, radar.io -> radar.com ↩

Written by a human, not by AI :)