1 wk. ago • 100%

The British government is transferring sovereignty of an island in the Indian Ocean to Mauritius next week, potentially impacting the existence of the .io domain.

every.to The Disappearance of an Internet Domain

How geopolitics can alter digital infrastructure

Technology @lemmy.ml The Disappearance of an Internet Domain (about .io, and about the history of .su and .yu)

United Kingdom @feddit.uk The Disappearance of an Internet Domain

Technology @lemmy.world The Disappearance of an Internet Domain

35 comments

the warning for future tech founders is clear: Be careful when picking your top-level domain. Physical history is never as separate from our digital future as we like to think.

Kinda ironic this is published to a website with a .to ccTLD for the Kingdom of Tonga.

71
- My former company had a .bb domain for internal services because it rhymed with the name. We had constant outages whenever a storm was hitting Barbados…
  
  9
  
  Interesting, that's not something I ever thought about. I just looked up the nameservers for .bb:
  
  ;; ANSWER SECTION: bb. 86400 IN NS ns5.nic.bb. bb. 86400 IN NS ns3.nic.bb. bb. 86400 IN NS ns2.nic.bb. bb. 86400 IN NS ns1.nic.bb. bb. 86400 IN NS ns4.nic.bb. bb. 86400 IN NS ns6.nic.bb.
  
  It seems like ns1.nic.bb doesn't resolve, and for 2-6, they're all in either 64.68.192.0/20 or 64.119.192.0/20, so it does look like a small concentration in root nameservers which could be unavailable in a storm.
  
  3
Kind of good in a way. It was always colonialism for tech companies to be using it anyway, when it wasn't meant for them.

30
- I mean IANA or whatever literally made up a standard where two letter TLDs were reserved for countries even if they aren't how those countries refer to themselves, see gr for Greece. I'm assuming .io just stands for Indian Ocean in this case, which seems like probably not how the chagosans self identify. Then you have countries like Montenegro that have .me and realized it means something in English so capitalized on it by licensing a company to resell .me domains.
  
  I don't think I have any particular point other than I think it's dumb to have a system of artificial scarcity be the only alternative to having to remember the IP of every damn site I want to use.
  
  25
  
  I’m assuming .io just stands for Indian Ocean in this case
  
  British Indian Ocean Territory, it was just shortened to .io so it would fit into the naming scheme.
  
  10
  
  If IANA has all two letter domains reserved for countries, than why is there no .uk?
  
  4
- Unfortunately the IANA decided to kill the TLD altogether, but the Chagos islanders have been asking to get control of it themselves so they can receive the registration fees. This was sort of the worst of both worlds: they could have given the Chagos islands it's own TLD, or given control of .io to the Chagos islanders, but instead they just said, "you're not sovereign, so you get nothing".
  
  edit: I'm reading elsewhere that it's not yet decided for sure whether to kill the TLD, but no one seems to think it will be given to the Chagossians, unfortunately.
  
  9
  
  I don’t get why they killed it. some regional areas have their own TLD. .cat for Catalonia, for example.
  
  2
- .tv has entered the chat
  
  3
i'd rather they return chagos to the islanders

16
- I don't really know anything about Chagos, but is that really what the islanders want? A quick google suggests the islanders might find it difficult to agree.
  
  Most micro island nations just aren't viable as a sovereign nation in 2024. They need air travel, health services, telecommunications, building materials, food imports, education, et cetera. Sadly they just aren't able to produce anything of any value with which to pay for all of those things.
  
  In many cases they end up trading their sovereignty for political positions. It looks like there's already a detention centre for sri lankans in Chagos. China will happily pay then millions a year for them not to recognise Taiwan as a sovereign state, which is kinda ironic.
  
  Nauru is a fairly interesting island nation. They sold the rights to their phosphate (bird poo) 80 (?) some years ago, and after it was extracted they were left with a moon scape. Sadly they squandered the money with some comically bad investments, including a broadway production IIRC. Health outcomes are pretty terrible.
  
  It looks like there's already a military base in Chagos, so I guess that's something they can trade on.
  
  Another problem with sovereignty is migration rights. If you're born somewhere like that you would absolutely want the opportunity to go to university in Australia or UK or similar.
  
  7
  
  i think at the very least the chagossians would like to be included in negotiations instead of having their islands traded between the UK and Mauritius without their involvement
  
  14
Or more likely, they will just move the domain to be a generic TLD instead of a country code TLD, due to it's popularity in the tech space.

15
Corporations with loads of money will ensure that this domain will simply get reclassified.

14
- Can they do that? I thought all two letter TLDs were reserved for ccTLDs only. It'll be interesting to see how things play out.
  
  5
  
  Perhaps not an actual reclassification since, until now, all two letter TLDs have been exclusively for countries. But for the right price, I imagine convincing them to maintain the two character TLD... for "posterity" ... and... "backwards compatibility"...
  
  coughs, clears throat, and pushes 💰 across the table
  
  ...would make sense.
  
  😏
  
  12
For people who haven't been following this story, the Chagos islanders don't want companies to stop using the .io domain, they want to receive the registration fees, which is much more important to them than having the TLD go away.

Unfortunately, because the territory is going to Mauritius instead of to the Chagos islanders, IANA is killing the TLD entirely (since Mauritius already has their own country TLD).

10
You guys 'member agar.com? /s

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