The purpose of making sure people understand something is a country code stems from risks that gtlds do not have. That is geo political risk, if someone else was to take charge of a country or territory they don't need to tell ICANN anything, they can say once a domain expires we will not permit it to be renewed as one example.
Or a country code can be retired:
When a ccTLD is no longer eligible, typically due to the country or code’s removal from the ISO 3166-1 standard, the operator is expected to develop a transition plan to the successor ccTLD(s) and ultimately retire the domain. Consistent with the general approach that ccTLDs are to be managed within the country, the manager is expected to design and execute a locally-appropriate method of notifying impacted registrants that the domain is to be retired, and develop a timeline to transition to new ccTLDs.
This transition and retirement plan is reviewed in a similar fashion to a delegation or redelegation request. As countries are typically replaced with new successor countries, this process is usually performed in conjunction with delegation of new ccTLDs. Usually there is a transition period of several years so that there is plenty of time for registrants to transition to the new domain(s).
ICANN works with the manager to provide guidance and assistance throughout the whole process based on ICANN’s experience from other countries that have had to perform a retirement transition.
A cctld may impose a local presence requirement where they can require registrants to have a local presence. If a ultra nationalist leader takes over this may be seen as a way to make a political statement.
.LY was a hot repurposed cctld for awhile until:
In 2010, Libya
shut down a URL shortener (vb.ly) because the content of the website "fell outside of Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law." vb.ly was
billed as "the Internet's first and only sex-positive link shortener service. Meaning, links are not filtered or groomed, and we'll never pull your links because we decided to become 'family friendly.'" Writer (and vb.ly operator) Violet Blue wrote after the shutdown, "Anyway, [Libyan government officials] said that a picture of me with my bare arms was illegal, my bottle of beer also illegal, and the words 'sex positive' also, illegal according to the laws I was never shown, and were never applied throughout my first year of registration." Domain registrar beware.
In 2011, various politicians were
surprised to learn that they had been using no_url_shorteners URLs that were (at least in some small part) affiliated with Libya. The
Wall Street Journal reported:
Human Rights Watch, which has blasted the Gadhafi regime for blocking Internet access within Libya, is one organization that unwittingly used the .ly addresses. "It's ironic and a little bit distasteful," says Tom Malinowski, the group's Washington director, upon learning the news from a reporter.
Libya
announced in 2010 that in the future, domain names shorter than 4 characters (we're looking it you, no_url_shorteners and no_url_shorteners) are reserved for companies that actually operate in Libya (which no_url_shorteners, no_url_shorteners, vb.ly, and most others don't). In short, the country controls its domain names and can make its own rules. This may be why Google's URL-shortening service goo.gl uses the
.gl domain from Greenland -- a country not known for political strife.
Source
I have been writing about this and fielding questions with this on .TV for over a decade, some worry if the island sinks what happens ? Tuvalu says their country lives on virtually, and a top reason behind that thinking is to maintain rights to .TV. Verisign would also go to bat for them there because if IANA ruled Tuvalu no longer a country and retired the .tv extension a lot of people would be pissed.
The SEO factor means very little compared to what can happen to your domain name due to a myriad of factors that no one is thinking about now. Everything is always cool, until it isn't.
Do I think a lot of these things will happen ? No but there is a chance and .io has some controversy around it as well
From
GigaOM The Dark Side of .io
The .io country code top-level domain is pretty popular right now, particularly among tech startups that want to take advantage of the snappy input/output reference and the relative availability of names — Fusion.io, Wise.io and Import.io are just a few examples. But who benefits from the sale of .io domains? Sadly, not the people who ultimately should.
There is another remote possibility — Mauritius might win its sovereignty dispute with the U.K. over the Chagos Islands. If that happens, the ownership of .io rights would probably be up in the air.
