I say this as someone who likes fediverse microblogging (Mastodon, MissKey, etc) it will never be Mastodon. Mastodon and its maintainers are staunchly against all the things that would make it a viable replacement to Twitter.

Why wouldn’t they?

Well almost nothing in this world is priced based solely on the cost of materials so I wouldn’t waste your time thinking in terms like that. And it is in fact the case that a $500 router is demonstrably better than a $100 router. A $300 UniFi router is pretty much the ground floor of decent router performance, and even then you’re severely lacking in warranty and support, and the software is subpar.

Beyond a certain point things that are more expensive are just more expensive because they are, not because they represent better quality.

This is true, but the “certain point” in this case is not $100. $500 is much closer to being that point, and even then that’s only if you’re thinking in the scope of a consumer router. Business class routers are thousands of dollars.

Why would it be wild to you that someone would use a technology the way it’s intended?

$500 is not an unreasonable price for a router if it’s actually good and comes with a good warranty.

Is he not the very same president who tried to ban it before?

Normies

It sure does

I’m not sure what the logical outcome of this escalating arms race of enshittification will be, but as a career Sysadmin I’ve been able to avoid a LOT of this bullshit through self hosting, which is something a (Non-tech nerd) layman isn’t going to bother with, for as long as existing products (and their subscriptions) are still within “tolerable” levels.

But the thing is, a lot of the convenience with computing devices today didn’t exist in the 90’s, when it was more common for young normies to have what would be considered above average computer technical skills today.

When the entire market turns into inescapable subscriptions, the market for a non-technical friendly appliance box, like Synology came close to doing, shows up to corner the market on hardware you can own and run your own shit on with minimal headaches and no subscriptions.

I should clarify that what I’m asking is what you think the benefit would be. Since you don’t have an answer to the question I will give it to you: There would be no benefit. There already exists dozens of gTLDs to migrate to, they don’t need another specific one.

I don’t think they really need a standardized place to move to. The natural gTLD for them to move to today would be .tech, but it could be anything. Nothing wrong with good old .com. Every one of these companies undoubtedly already own at least a dozen versions of their domains on all the most popular gTLDs. The time scale of moving would also be 5-10 years. Thats plenty of time to move your domain, have a redirect on the old domain, and people to get used to the new domain.

…why? For what purpose and how would that help at all?

The coexistence of .gb and .uk is only because .uk predates the rule by a few months. You could say it was grandfathered in, though they are both reserved in ISO 3166-1. This one isn’t a good example of something that can happen decades after the rule was put in place.

As for .eu it isn’t really an exception, .eu is reserved in ISO 3166-1.

How would IANA changing one TLD into a different TLD and then everyone using the old TLD migrating everything to the new TLD be any easier than everyone just migrating everything to a new TLD?

In either case there wouldn’t be anything “in unison” about it.

Yes I have. ccTLDs are 2 characters, as I specified above. To make .io into a gTLD you’d need to add a third character, which wouldn’t do anything to help the companies who are using .io today.

The companies who are using .io who aren’t associated with the Indian Ocean Territories will however have 5 years (or 10 if an extension is requested) to migrate to a gTLD before .io is retired.

gTLDs are 3 characters or more (.com .net .org ). 2 characters TLDs are reserved for ccTLDs. This allows a CLEAR separation between gTLDs and ccTLDs, so that precisely what’s happening with the .io ccTLD doesn’t happen on accident.

The reason is because ccTLDs need to match the alpha-2 code of the country as it exists in ISO 3166-1. This is because IANA doesn’t want to be the arbiter of which countries exist or not. You get a code, you get a ccTLD. No code, no ccTLD.

.su exists in spite of the policy of IANA, not because of them. The popularity of a ccTLD has no relevance to its continued existence.

ITT: People who think this won’t happen because they don’t understand the first thing about IANA, ICANN, their policies, ccTLDs, or the history of this kind of thing happening before. While ICANN has the authority to allow the .io domain to continue to exist, it would be a complete reversal on their newly established policy for retiring ccTLDs, which was primarily motivated by being burned on this exact type of thing happening before.

A good example is the .yu ccTLD which after a long back and forth was finally retired in 2010.

That is most definitely exactly exactly how it works.