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.