If ICANN really chooses to break every GitHub Pages, crates.io, gcr.io, quay.io, etc. URL just to blindly follow a policy, then they will have proven themselves an incompetent arbiter of the domain name system. This feels so unlikely that I'm not worried about it all.
Of course I can understand if someone finds the situation stupid. However, ICANN is clear with its rules and every entrepreneur has to take possible (political) uncertainties into account when choosing a .tld, which many have simply not done. You could also accuse them of "incompetence".
When choosing a domain for .de, I explicitly decided against a podcast bro tld like .io / .ai etc. because of these reasons.
This will cause a massive amount of links to go dead on the web and that's a fact. It will definitely not only affect people who hold .io domains.
That's talking about the portion of URIs after the domain name. In reality, domain names themselves do change from time to time and it's wise to be able to accommodate that.
A cool URI makes that change easier for the provider because it means the only part of the URI that would have to change is the domain name. The rest can remain the same as always.
> This will cause a massive amount of links to go dead on the web and that's a fact.
Well, sure, and the maintainer of those links need to change them. I'm not seeing how this is a major crisis. Link go dead all the time. It would be an annoyance, certainly.
No, we need to migrate off ccTLD.
If it turned out to be a nothing-burger then I would use that .io for a blog page related to the community or something else non business or revenue critical and have links back to the new domain. I would keep the commercial content on the .com, the community forums on .net and philanthropic type content on .org or .io. i.e. news about donations to funding a new no-kill animal shelter and such