UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729325 - Oct 2024 (33 comments)
He's since sold it on and now a hedge fund owns it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io
Officially, the British Indian Ocean Territories will cease to exist, therefore so would the ISO 2-letter country code. However, ccTLDs have outlasted countries before, notably ".su" for the no longer existing USSR. I suspect that IANA would prioritise not breaking millions of domain names over trying to police ccTLDs.
Google's view on the matter is that .io is already effectively a gTLD rather than a ccTLD, like with .nu, .to, .tv, as most of the registrants run websites with a global audience or at least an audience other than the island nations whose ccTLDs they are.
It does seem likely that ICANN won't kill off all existing registrations, but this is supposition, not an answer. If we look only at what they've done historically to ccTLDs the most likely outcome is that new registrations become locked and ICANN attempts to phase the .io TLD out.
They may break that trend now given how much they've already polluted the TLD space, but they may not, and I think your comment is a bit too optimistic. People with .io domains should absolutely be paying close attention here.
Edit: gnfargbl found the actual written policy [0].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain#...
There was also a .um for US minor outlying islands, removed in 2008.
It's absolutely possible that someone will asking for an exceptional reservation for IO at ISO and it can be kept alive forever.
I agree it's possible, I disagree with OP that it's a foregone conclusion.
At this point if I were the owner of a .io domain I would treat that as the unlikely best case scenario and start looking at what domain I'd fall back to if ICANN sticks to their rules.
At one point, it was intended that moving the UK's internet resources to .gb would be the final stage of the transition from the internal JANET system.
By the time I first heard about that in the early 90s, that had already gained legendary "that'll never happen" status - and, sure enough, the transition was declared complete when the last UK.AC.SITE <-> ac.uk mail gateways were retired circa 1996.
Apparently "United" and "Kingdom" aren't valid for ISO, so they went with ignoring part of the name completely.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2
Breaking with ISO 3166-1 comes with the risk that a new ISO-standardized country cannot claim its TLD.
So in order to reclaim the TLD as generic, startups dont just have to persuade ICANN, they have to make the case to ISO that IO is a significant enough code that it should be an "exceptional reservation" like UK, UN, EU, and SU.
Accepting registrations for a domain is pretty useless when those domains aren't going to resolve to anything.
This was a known and willfully ignored business risk for these places.
Jump a hundred years forwards to a hypothetical future where the USA is fragmenting, Iowa becomes a country, IA and IW are already assigned to some other countries that have sprung up, and ISO is somehow still relevant. When Iowa says “we want IO”, what do you say? “Sorry, we used that code a hundred years ago for a tiny island in the middle of nowhere, how do you feel about YA, it sounds a little like Iowa, right?”
(Admittedly if the USA fragmented, each state into a country, you’d have far worse problems than Iowa. Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana… eight Ms, and already M_ is down to only three available, MB, MI and MJ. M is a popular letter to start names with.)
There are already a few country codes assigned where I can’t see where the second letter came from, e.g. AW, AX, BJ, BQ, CW, GW, SX, PW. A definite habit of giving a W or X if they can’t come up with anything better.
A few country codes have already been reassigned once (having formerly been either assigned or reserved indefinitely, then deleted): AI, BQ, GE, LT, ME, RU, SK.
Many territories have TLDs even if they're just a region of another country, like .tf and .re in the Indian Ocean which are on France. So there's no reason .io could not just continue without change (other than NIC ownership) now that it's part of Mauritius.
Of course, in the end, it'll probably end up with no end-user impact because someone (the existing operator or a new one) will negotiate a deal ($$$) with Mauritius that will provide continuity of operations and (hopefully) be more beneficial to the people of Chagos.
Tl;dr: "someone will likely run .io until ICANN turns it off, which it probably will, but we don't know who that is right now".
Now it seems likely I will only have to worry about the hedge funds!
It's a novelty TLD, and anyone who used it expecting stability should have looked for a different flag of convenience.
Alternatively ICANN might (should imo) transfer the TLD registrar to Mauritius.
Doesn't seem like a random wheeler dealer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kane_(entrepreneur)
> from 2010 to 2017 was one of seven people entrusted with a credit card-like key to restart portions of the World Wide Web or internet which are secured with DNSSEC,
He also claimed he paid these countries... somehow... and yet the UK government said he didn't. A shady wheeler-dealer with exceptionally good connections to the people that ran DNS before IANA/ICANN existed.
https://fortune.com/2020/08/31/crypto-fraud-io-domain-chagos...
> The terms of the agreement remain secret, but in 2014 Kane told me that a portion of the .io proceeds went to the British government, to be deposited into an account for the administration of the Chagos Islands. Responding to a subsequent parliamentary question that year from Lord Avebury, a liberal civil rights advocate, the government said that it had no such plans, because it received no revenues from ICB.
> Kane did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this article. The U.K.’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office declined to comment on the Chagossians’ claim to the domain extension and again denied that the British government receives any .io proceeds.
I'm surprised this wouldn't be the default behavior for existing owners? Kinda making me re-think buying an IO domain for my personal stuff. Are gTLDs the safest option?
https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/12/24071036/queer-af-mastodo...
An analogy: a bunch of indigenous people are kicked off their island, and coffee is grown there by the people who evicted them. You buy the coffee, and the people who have the rightful claim to the land don't receive any of the profits.
To add insult to injury, the coffee is named after the island it's grown on, and that's mostly why it's popular - because it's a really good name for coffee (maybe it's called Java Island).
That's basically what the .io domain is.
To be honest, if .io is not handed back to the Chagossian, it would be better to shut it down and turn the page on a pretty shameful page of internet history.
The short answer is that -- if ICANN follows the policy -- then following the removal of IO from ISO-3166-2, the ccTLD has five years to initiate an orderly shutdown.
The ccTLD manager may request that this be extended to a maximum of ten years, but to do so they need to have reasons beyond a general desire to retain the existing ccTLD.
"ccTLD eligibility is determined by the associated country or territory being assigned in the ISO 3166-1 standard."
So how does a country code get removed from the ISO 3166-1 list? A cursory web search wasn't very revealing.
The most information I can find is that the standard is maintained by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency [1]. Additions appear to be mostly at the direction of the United Nations [2], but I couldn't find a clear procedure as to how a country code is removed. I'm also unclear on who makes the decision to mark codes as exceptionally reserved.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166#ISO_3166_Maintenance_...
I use the scare quotes because Mauritius was a British colony at the time, and so the offer was quite possibly one that the Mauritians couldn't refuse. That, and the fact that £50m (in today's money) seems ridiculously cheap.
[1] https://cdn.standards.iteh.ai/samples/2448/e41694ad96e34e95b...
Association française de normalisation (AFNOR), France
American National Standards Institute (ANSI), United States
British Standards Institution (BSI), United Kingdom
Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN), Germany
Institut Marocain de Normalisation (IMANOR)
Iran National Standards Organization (INSO)
Standards Australia (SA)
Standards Council of Canada (SCC)
Swedish Standards Institute (SIS)
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)
International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
Universal Postal Union (UPU)
United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1#Criteria_for_inclus...
The Chagos Archipelago is a good distance from the rest of Mauritius, and so it may perhaps retain a separate registration on the ISO list.
.co is owned by Columbia
.tv is owned by Tuvalu
.me is owned by MontenegroSome English-speaking people may treat them as global and not linked to countries, but they're not. The difference with .io is that BIOT was never a country and soon won't exist - whereas those countries have existed and will continue [1] to exist.
[1] quite possibly with the unfortunate exception of Tuvalu
aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombia
(not the NYC school, or the TV network)
Hope ICANN (a corrupt organization) doesn't "change its mind" about this at the last moment, due to some "lobbying" involved. We'll see!
A sword of damacles hanging over every single discussion on HN is "The internet is still largely unregulated" because that discussion leads to "the internet is regulated by private bodies who got there first."
no one wants to admit that our employers and thus we benefit from this wild west of corruption.
ICANN, IANAL, CABF, Moz Security Council.... all made of of public corporations vying to make money.
Until
If the standards committee takes the same approach with IO, then it's possible that gives ICANN a route not to apply this policy. However, if IO is deleted completely, then my reading is the policy would apply.
Luckily, since I used a custom address for each place I used it (so I could track and block spam easily), I kept a spreadsheet of every site I used it with. 55 sites so far and I haven’t had to block anything for being sold, so it hasn’t really been that useful so far.
Luckily, tho, I use alias from my mail provider, so I don't have to write them down.
Also, a password manager, so it won't be too much work changing my E-Mail Domain Name.
But it's still unfortunate. It's just a ccTLD what does it matter, let us keep it.
The idea was if I got spam, I’d know who not to trust in the future, and could easily send anything to that address to spam/trash.
I use a password manager as well, and have all the accounts tagged in there as well. The spreadsheet was basically a backup, and for if I gave an email address out that wasn’t actually tied to an account I’d have a password for.
On the other hand, .yu expired after being managed by Serbia for a few years [1].
If I had to guess I'd say .io will likely follow .su, not .yu, because there's enough lobbying power behind the TLD to at least keep resolving the existing domains. But from what I can see the default course for a ccTLD is to get phased out when its corresponding country disappears.
Edit: gnfargbl found the actual written policy [3].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.su
Not my recollection. As far as I know ICANN said they will retire it, a handful of companies in Russia complained and ICANN said that if they want to retain it they need to get the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency to create an exceptional reservation. Today it has an exceptional reservation so .su won't be retired.
As for how that reservation was created and what the process is I don't know.
I suspect the above statement isn't actually a true statement across the world, but at least for today the list of roots isn't generically ideological in the same way a broad set of "obvious truths" is now ideological.
Curious what the trade aspects are like-- I'd expect there's a lot of industrial commonality and shared inherited legal norms, so if you're already doing business in one former Soviet republic, is it comparatively easy to expand to others?
[1] ICB acquired by Afilias, Afilias acquired by Donuts, Donuts rebranded to Identity Digital.
With the demise of X.400 e-mail and IANA's general aim of one TLD per country, use of .gb declined; the domain remains in existence, but it is not currently open to new domain registrations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.gb
NB I was curious as to whether .gb would be strict and exclude NI - who get to use .ie if they want...
https://hackernoon.com/stop-using-io-domain-names-for-produc...
My guess is that noting will happen for now. It’s mostly a decision that ICANN working groups have to figure out. But given the current size of the .io zone and that we already have a non existing cctld (.su for Soviet Unite), I’m pretty confident it will exist in the mid-term future.
IMO what will probably happen is that ICANN "promotes" the zone to being yet another top-level non-country code domain like .biz or .horse etc. Which is effectively what it is now.
Edit to add:
I don't think the .su precedent is applicable here. The Soviet Union was an internationally recognised state with a population, military, Montevideo Convention duties, seat at the UN, etc. The BIOT was and is nothing like that.
Sure, there's a lot of evidence that they were "terra nullius" before being claimed for the British empire. But the Chagos archipelago was inhabited utill its population was compulsorily expelled in the mid twentieth century.
I was surprised to discover that Ascension even has a ccTLD. I guess I assumed that the population was wholly military.
That's because it was created by the same guy who created .io and .sh - British DNS "pioneer" Paul Kane, who clearly had a passion for finding remaining corners of the British Empire that could "claim" a bit of internet land (for his own profit).
ICANN will act in whatever manner causes them the least trouble, which will be to retain the status quo. They have absolutely no incentive to behave otherwise.
It's pretty detrimental to relationships when one side pre-declares their rules and policies, and then arbitrarily decides to ignore them.
I'd say they have a lot of incentive to behave in whatever way their published policies state, regardless of the impact to users of the cctld.
(I don't know what the policies are)
Before the retirement of .yu, Slovenia wanted to hold on to it, but it was not the successor state of Yugoslavia so they had to relinquish control and pass it to Serbia. So going by that logic, it would not stay in the UK (for long).
It’s like if Guantanamo Bay had its own ccTLD.
The land will go to Mauritius, the legal entity of British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist (presumably).
Mauritius could decide to incorporate it as "Mauritius Indian Ocean Territory", hence maintaining the CC. I expect .io owners will likely suggest something like that, while showing them how much money they could get from a 10-15% deal similar to what Tuvalu has for .tv. Nobody likes to burn money.
I agree with you though, there doesn't seem to be a strong rule for this kind of thing and all interested parties would likely prefer for .io to continue to exist, so it will continue to exist, probably under Mauritius's ownership.
[0] https://snapshot.internetx.com/en/these-tlds-do-not-exist-an...
They might get enough complaints that they have to keep extending that date indefinitely. And they might not choose to do it at all in this case. But they've been very clear over the years what ccTLDs are supposed to be for, and their first instinct will be to preserve the integrity of the naming system as designed, not to preserve startups who bet on them ignoring their own rules.
There's a list of ccTLDs that died. .yu expired in 2010. .zr moved mostly to .cd in 2001.
Perhaps .io will not disappear immediately, but it can definitely fall under new management, possibly with double or triple the already high fees for good measure, or registrations will be restricted to the people of Mauritius.
A TLD will not keep existing just because people use it, especially a TLD belonging to a specific government such as .io or .ai.
That's precisely how the world works. When you build your business on another business, these things happen. And especially on the internet.
Anyone who's been on the internet for more than a decade or so will have seen that random business-changing tectonic shifts happen all the time.
If you've always grown up in the current era of "stable" and ubiquitous internet, it may seem like it's always been there and always will be. It hasn't. It won't.
I doubt I could send email to anyone on bitnet or via a UUCP bang path, for example.
This iteration of the internet is pretty big; it may not die (where you live) but it will likely continue fragmenting into a loosely coupled set of affiliated networks with semi-realtime gateways between them (see also UUCP / bitnet).
Isn't the Internet already a "loosely coupled set of affiliated networks", with each AS being a separate network?
Maybe skynet uses one set of roots and thenet uses a different set of roots and freenet has taken the IPs of the roots and sends you to their dns heirarchy and they also mandate that you have their set of CAs.
But as of right now people don't carry different phones to communicate on different internets (though they do have different chat / voice communication applications / networks).
UUCP / bitnet were (are?) store-and-forward gateway mechanisms. "If you want to send email to that google address you have to send it as friend@gmail.com@@freenet_audit and it'll be forwarded if the filters approve."
My point is that there have been a variety of different internets in the past; this one got the name "the internet" but there's no reason it won't fragment (more) into a morass semi-incompatible fragments.
I can't tell you how much I enjoyed reading this comment and realizing that I don't have a clue what half of this means. :D
And if you boot up a machine from 10+ years ago, many sites won't work because they require TLS1.2+.
Nothing lasts forever :-/
So nothing really changes lol. Just a couple of paperwork remarks
If Diego Garcia remains as UK-sovereign land, then since different laws (etc) apply it's likely ISO would keep the IO code for it.
If Mauritius keeps the islands they gain with a different status (tax, immigration and so on) compared to the rest of Mauritius, then a code might be needed for that — but Mauritius probably won't be keen on "IO".
If the whole lot becomes 'ordinary Mauritius' then the code is no longer needed and will be removed.
A crime against humanity begins to get fixed. Chagosians will finally be allowed to go back to their homes. Mauritius will get paid a rent for the lease of the Diego Garcia base from the US.
Also, Mauritius is a signatory of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and thus no nuclear weapons are allowed within its territory. TBD if there will be a special agreement allowing special sovereignty for the US/UK, which might allow the US to station nuclear weapons there (which it probably currently does).
So there's definitely change. The UK and US finally accepted their crime, which is extremely rare. Genuinely, are there other examples of them suffering consequences (even if their consequences are a return to the status quo, ish), for other of their violations of international law and/or crimes against humanity? None come to mind.
This is a reminder that these islands were uninhabited prior to European discovery.
It is true that they imported ... basically slaves ... from/via semi-nearby islands to work on it, but it's not like it was some ancestral island to them. When the work stopped, they were returned to the islands their ancestors came from (or at least via).
(This case is somewhat different than the also-originally-uninhabited Falkland Islands, where most people living there were always of European descent).
And they weren't "returned", they were expelled from their homes and dumped somewhere else with no assistance.
It's a bit more than probable - being one of the very few places in the world where nuclear submarines can dock. It's also extremely unlikely to change; even if no specific verbiage is in the treaty, US/UK will likely continue to do as they please; Mauritius will simply look the other way in exchange for money and protection. Realpolitik is a thing.
Money will probably be the only thing to convince them.
I'm not sure China would mind having a place to station assets either.
Since it's two letters long, it cannot be retained as a generic TLD, as it's in the country TLD namespace and might be reused as such for a different country in the (very far) future. With only 26*26 = 676 possibilities and currently around 200 countries you just can't keep old codes around without an extremely good reason.
Given that all the dictionary word .com/.nets got bought out a long long time before many of these startups, started up, a lot of money needs to change hands.
I don't know anything about the history of these particular TLDs, but this page really comes off as 'hey we now have a load of money and can afford to buy the .net we always wanted but it's actually it's for a good reason and we're better than those other hip new companies' - kinda like 'my expensive personalised number plate is actually raising awareness for world peace - your standard one means you don't care' or something.
Again, I'm just a complete outsider here, but that's my initial reaction. Maybe I'm just jaded.
To be more on topic, to quote:
there was a security issue with the .io domain. In 2017, a researcher managed to take control of four of the seven authoritative name servers for the .io domain. We accept that mistakes can happen, strong processes limit the chances of them happening, but they still can.
However, the domain administrator made no attempt, at any time, to communicate with anyone about the issue.
Worth reading Kevin Murphy’s piece here:
https://domainincite.com/30395-future-of-io-domains-uncertai...
It seems in poor taste to use your privileges to perform digital colonization, revise the intention that .IO was never about Indian Ocean territory, and justify it all simply because it was a convenient way at the time for you to get attention and make money.
If you stand by it, what is the correct number of people to have their rights systematically and intentionally violated before we should care?
Edit:
If we were holding a consistent standard here, we would have to say that the Vietnamese government should withdraw from illegally occupied South Vietnam and return it to the people who were violently displaced in 1975. Nobody advocates for this. Vietnam has somewhat liberalized into the kind of country that doesn’t do this sort of thing anymore and the refugees of 1975 and their descendants have built new lives in the countries they ended up in, including the United States. This sort of revanchism causes more problems than it solves, and there’s no obvious limit to it. Should Turkey return Constantinople to the Greeks? If we want to learn anything from history, it shouldn’t be a catalog of ancestral grudges to be settled; it should be that holding onto these grudges achieves nothing.
Also the Chagossian man in the Wikipedia article is incredibly jacked. I am assuming that physique is just from physical labor but holy cow.
He's probably 5'4" - 5'8" (and standing alone) which helps significantly.
no one outside your isolated little echo chambers gives a shit though.
I don't think it's very likely that it will be retired given the state of .su.