It's not anymore: "in April 2026 the implementation of the agreement was put on an indefinite hold due to opposition from US President Donald Trump." So whatever ICANN was going to do with .io, it's all on hold for now.

There is a list called the Public Suffix List, which is used for most purposes to make determinations about which 2lds do not own/manage the corresponding 3lds. It's maintained by Mozilla as a public service, which isn't exactly where you'd expect to find it. But it's mostly important for web security / "same origin" stuff, so it makes sense.

In addition to all the country codes TLDs that do 3rd-level registration, the PSL does also include stuff like github.io. (Maintenance of the list involves manual volunteer labor, so scaling is a real problem...)

(And of course the PSL wouldn't work well for the .name situation, where it's sometimes 2 and sometimes 3, and it can change over time. But that's no excuse for this clusterfuck of just suddenly dropping a bunch of domains that are paid up years in advance.)

It's complicated and political, like always. Officially, the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code list is used to decide who gets a ccTLD. (And Taiwan is included there.) But for example ".su" still exists for historical reasons, even though the Soviet Union is long gone (and its code is listed as "exceptionally reserved", which I assume translates as "we have no fucking idea what to do here.")

This raises an interesting question. If they aren't strictly following UN recognition then would it be possible for ICANN to award control to one party while the UN recognizes an opposing party as the legitimate government?

The watermark is contained in the choice of output tokens. If you exert so much editorial control that Claude has no meaningful freedom in choosing tokens, then it's going to fail to watermark the text, unless the text is _very_ long (in which case even a very low-bit-rate watermark will eventually accumulate enough bits to be positive.)