He's since sold it on and now a hedge fund owns it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io
Officially, the British Indian Ocean Territories will cease to exist, therefore so would the ISO 2-letter country code. However, ccTLDs have outlasted countries before, notably ".su" for the no longer existing USSR. I suspect that IANA would prioritise not breaking millions of domain names over trying to police ccTLDs.
Google's view on the matter is that .io is already effectively a gTLD rather than a ccTLD, like with .nu, .to, .tv, as most of the registrants run websites with a global audience or at least an audience other than the island nations whose ccTLDs they are.
The short answer is that -- if ICANN follows the policy -- then following the removal of IO from ISO-3166-2, the ccTLD has five years to initiate an orderly shutdown.
The ccTLD manager may request that this be extended to a maximum of ten years, but to do so they need to have reasons beyond a general desire to retain the existing ccTLD.
On the other hand, .yu expired after being managed by Serbia for a few years [1].
If I had to guess I'd say .io will likely follow .su, not .yu, because there's enough lobbying power behind the TLD to at least keep resolving the existing domains. But from what I can see the default course for a ccTLD is to get phased out when its corresponding country disappears.
Edit: gnfargbl found the actual written policy [3].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.su
[1] ICB acquired by Afilias, Afilias acquired by Donuts, Donuts rebranded to Identity Digital.
https://hackernoon.com/stop-using-io-domain-names-for-produc...
My guess is that noting will happen for now. It’s mostly a decision that ICANN working groups have to figure out. But given the current size of the .io zone and that we already have a non existing cctld (.su for Soviet Unite), I’m pretty confident it will exist in the mid-term future.
Since it's two letters long, it cannot be retained as a generic TLD, as it's in the country TLD namespace and might be reused as such for a different country in the (very far) future. With only 26*26 = 676 possibilities and currently around 200 countries you just can't keep old codes around without an extremely good reason.
So nothing really changes lol. Just a couple of paperwork remarks
Worth reading Kevin Murphy’s piece here:
https://domainincite.com/30395-future-of-io-domains-uncertai...
It seems in poor taste to use your privileges to perform digital colonization, revise the intention that .IO was never about Indian Ocean territory, and justify it all simply because it was a convenient way at the time for you to get attention and make money.
UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729325 - Oct 2024 (33 comments)