Your Product Lives on a Domain Whose Country Is Changing Hands

Your company lives at a two letter name.

.io

It was cheap,
it sounded technical,
and every good dot com was gone.

It is on the website,
the login page,
the address every customer email comes from,
the API host
built into mobile apps
on phones
you will never update.

Those two letters
are not a brand.

They are a country code,
taken from the international list
of countries and territories,
and assigned to
the British Indian Ocean Territory.

In 2025 Britain signed a treaty
to hand those islands to Mauritius.

If the territory stops being
a separate entry on that list,
its code can be withdrawn,
and the internet has a written process
for what happens next
to a top level domain
whose territory has gone.

It is retired.

Slowly,
with years of notice,
five as a rule
and ten at the most,
but retired.

It has happened before.

.yu went with Yugoslavia.

.su outlived the Soviet Union
mostly by being left alone.

Nobody knows yet
which way .io goes.

Politics may keep the code alive.
The list may never change.

That uncertainty
is the point.

Your product's address
depends on a treaty,
a standards body
and a policy committee,
none of which
know you exist.

You do not need to panic.

You need to know
where the name is.

So search for it.

Every config file.
Every redirect URI
registered with an identity provider.
Every webhook a partner calls.
Every SDK default.
Every email template.
Every DNS record and certificate.

The hard ones are the copies
you do not control.

Apps on phones.
Firmware in devices.
Links printed on packaging.

Those are where five years
starts to feel short.

Then buy a second name
on a generic domain,
and serve from both now,
while it costs almost nothing.

Make clients fetch their endpoint
from a config you can update,
not a string compiled in.

None of this
is really about one territory.

Every domain you build on
is a dependency
with a governance model
you never read.

Read it once,
before somebody
reads it to you.

– Serguey Asael Shinder