Would love to see an exception made for this. The end of the article makes the point, there is indeed a lot of money tied up in that TLD.
I have one for personal use, and while I don't earn money through it, losing mine will still be disruptive to more than just me. We got time though. Appreciate the PSA!
Written by Gareth Edwards is a digital strategist, writer, and historian who has worked for startups and corporations in both the UK and U.S. He is an avid collector of old computers, rare books and interviews, and abandoned cats.
(Our family cat was an abandoned cat that had quite a history with our family: from my sibling and me sneaking him in the window and taking him to the vet, to my other sibling trying to train him to be a house pet months laters, to my dad sending a picture of the cat chilling at a new house in a different part of the city on their bed next to the family dog; took a while but the cat eventually became ours permanently)
So the moral of this post, we need solutions for this, right? To find a more permanent digital space where history can't be erased?
What I find confusing is why it has to go away. We have all kinds of bullshit domains now that it could just become another one of those. It doesn't need to go away to stop being a country domain. Tons of people in tech use it for I/O, myself included. I would think that there are far more websites using it that have nothing to do with the country anyway.
But we shouldn't have such centralized control of web domains. I doubt it will be easy to fully replace given how much traffic has been reduced to a relative handful of domains that have no interest in change.