I’m not talking about ICANN or the US controlling other countries domains. This problem goes way back to net, org, com — basically all “rules” applied since inception were loosey goosey suggestions that depended on nothing more than convention, and were not well thought out.
So deleting .io would really be on-brand, and a continuation of that incompetence.
Not at all. The rules were developed over time as the internet expanded from a handful of us research institutions to the global presence it is today. As other people in this thread mentioned, the present country code top level domain rules were developed from fiascoes like .su and .yu. Now they do have solid rules: they should follow them, regardless of corporate speculation and profiteering
