Nothing, because .io was operated by some wheeler-dealer without the authority of the UK. Apparently he just dumped money into the bank accounts of the various overseas territories he was selling the domain names for and they were OK with it?
He's since sold it on and now a hedge fund owns it.
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.
As far as I can find .su is the exception in surviving, not the rule, and who operated the ccTLD is irrelevant to the question of whether ICANN decides to allow it to live on.
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].
They might just change its status to a vanity top level domain like ".lol" or ".sucks" and sell it to the highest bidder, taking the money. They would justify it by saying that they want to promote stability, maybe require that the new owner honor the domains at least until they expire and then charge what they want. That seems to be the way ICANN works these days.
> 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.
.uk only exists because UKERNA was already using it (or, rather, UK.) for JANET's own X500-ish system that pre-dates the standardisation of DNS.
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.
Right, but confusingly, GB is the ISO 2 code for the United Kingdom, even though the United Kingdom is much bigger than Great Britain, where the GB abbreviation comes from.
I mean, the TLD .pizza exists, so could .io move to the same mechanism that allows those to exist? Or is it something like 2-3 character TLDs are reserved for country codes?
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.
And it doesn't matter what the registrars choose to do when the entire ".io" TLD gets kicked out of the root name servers - who in turn are following the official zone file as published by ICANN.
Accepting registrations for a domain is pretty useless when those domains aren't going to resolve to anything.
at least one of the root name servers is hosted by ICANN, so there's essentially zero chance that all of the roots will choose to disrgard the ICANN zone file.
If an ICANN decision would be seen as detrimental to the smooth operation of the global DNS network yes there is, their server would simply be quarantined yes it would be a problem since root servers are “hardcoded” in many places but for the most part all the major DNS services can continue to operate without them for a while at least.
Two-letter domains are defined to be ccTLDs—if it's two letters, it's a country code domain. Breaking that rule would risk leaving a future ISO-standardized country unable to claim its domain because its code was already assigned to a tech startup gTLD.
The short-lived country of Serbia and Montenegro got assigned .cs (from Crna Gora - Srbija) which previously belonged to Czechoslovakia, but it seems it was never used (they kept using .yu).
I've heard it discussed as a possibility tho I don't personally know how the ISO CC assignment process works. On the other hand, we don't exactly create new countries at a rate that exhausting 26^2 combinations should be an issue, but I suppose that could change.
> Officially, the British Indian Ocean Territories will cease to exist, therefore so would the ISO 2-letter country code.
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.
As someone with an io domain, I really appreciate this post. I've had general fears that political decisions would be made that would make trouble for me on top of the standard business decisions to take as much as they can from me.
Now it seems likely I will only have to worry about the hedge funds!
It doesn't really track that the original creation of .io being sordid means a political change won't have implications, modelled on and/or justified by the questionable history..
> 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,
It's a ccTLD not controlled by the country it's for. Paul Kane was a personal friend of Jon Postel, and Postel simply gave him authority to run .io, .ac, and .sh, which he did privately for his own benefit.
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.
> 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 suspect that IANA would prioritise not breaking millions of domain names over trying to police ccTLDs.
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?
You should always be aware of political risks when buying a ccTLD. There's precedent that these have caused serious issues for domain holders, one notable example
Outages and poor management are one possibility. Other is the fact that you have to trust the country running the ccTLD with DNSSEC keys. This might rule out things like using TLSA/DANE or SSHFP records.
The gTLDs are also subject to the whims of a foreign country (usually the USA). The safest option is probably your own country's ccTLD, since any dispute would go solely through your own country's laws and courts (to which you're already subjected, by virtue of living there).
A hedge fund operates the .io domain, they don't AFAIK own it without restriction. As a ccTLD, what happens if Mauritius tells ICANN "nope, not theirs, ours now, it's an asset as part of the transfer of sovereignty". In fact, in the link you provide, it looks like people involved have already starting a repatriation effort.
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.
Mauritius already has an ISO 3166 code "MU" and matching ccTLD ".mu". "IO" isn't going to be a standard code. Its far from a foregone conclusion that ".io" will exist 10 years from now.
Yes, you are of course right...10 years + (however many years the legal process of transferring sovereignty takes) + (some number of extra years because stuff happens) from now I would completely agree it probably won't be around. But from an internet perspective for a mostly fad driven TLD I personally would expect on the day .io finally disappears from the nameservers the reaction will be "oh...that was still around?" or worse case a tiny number of "I forgot we registered that".
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".
The .io/.sh/.ac TLDs were effectively invented and run by a British guy; he states some of the resulting profits were shared back with the UK government, which controls those territories, to benefit the inhabitants of such territories; the UK government denies this ever happened. The reality is likely that those people were effectively stripped of their rightful "internet property", in a way not dissimilar from old colonial exploitation.
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.
I don't think it does directly, but I suppose in a macro sense, by paying for a .io domain you're contributing to the system responsible for the exploitation of these people.
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).
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.
That's a very good question. I don't know; does any other HN'er?
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.
Perhaps the operative question is how did IO get into the ISO 3166 in the first place? My guess would be as part of the UK defensively creating the illusion of it being a legitimate territory.
It was in the original 1974 standard [1]. No real idea on the politics of the time, but Britain had "paid" Mauritius £3 million for the islands less than ten years before [2], and of course the US base on Diego Garcia was already established.
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.
The ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency makes the changes to ISO 3166. They follow notifications from and include members from these other bodies:
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)
You're right these agencies make changes... but they don't decide if a country gets a ccTLD or not. They take their cue from the UN's Country Names bulletin, which in turn requires the country to be member state of the UN, or a member of one of its agencies, or a party to the Statute of the International Court of Justice
ISO 3166-1 is maintained by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency which has members from agencies like ANSI, BSI, DIN, …. No way are they going to just let .io simply go out of existence. It's more like that Mauritius will attain ownership and then manage it similarly to other 'gTLDs'.
.co is owned by Columbia
.tv is owned by Tuvalu
.me is owned by Montenegro
.co, .tv, and .me are ccTLDs not gTLDs. They're the ISO 3166 codes for those countries.
Some 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
You're welcome. I think people here are often surprised that the internet registries actually spend time thinking about this stuff, and developing policy for it. But they do, and the results are easily accessible -- the link I provided was the top search engine hit for "icann cctld retirement policy".
I use a .io domain for some of my email. I’m starting to think I should divest and change my email everywhere instead of continuing to add more places to it. And worry about monitoring for a potential future shutdown.
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.
ICANN's position is that their policy is triggered by changes to ISO-3166. The code SU has not been removed from ISO-3166-2; instead it is "exceptionally reserved" (as is the code UK).
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.
By definition, any organization not composed entirely of elected representatives making completely transparent, documented decisions in perpetuity, 100 percent correctly is corrupt.
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.
I agree that transparent and documented decisions are good evidence for not being corrupt, and I can see how you could argue that they're required (as a non-corrupt organisation that hides the reasoning behind its decisions is largely indistinguishable from a corrupt organisation that coincidentally makes the same decisions), but what do elections have to do with anything?
The .su ccTLD survived the collapse of the Soviet Union [0], with Russia maintaining it. It sounds like ICANN has tried to get rid of it but had too much opposition.
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].
.su hopefully dies in the future. It is often used for cybercrime, neo-nazi websites and the russian controlled puppet government of certain russian controlled Ukrainian territories.
The GDR (East Germany) also had its own TLD, .dd (for Deutsche Demokratische Republik), but it was never operated in the global DNS and there were only like two registrations.
The crazy thing is that there's a list of actually agreed-upon root name servers and they maintain a uniform namespace for the internet.
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.
The .io registry is operated by Identity Digital which is a consolidation of a bunch of different registries from the last decade[1]. Identity Digital own (and sometimes just operate) many different TLDs and ccTLDs: most likely, the registrar will retain the right to operate the ccTLD and start paying license fees for each .io to Mauritius. The .tv ccTLD is the most famous example of this, as something like 15% of Tuvalu's GDP is from licensing of the .tv ccTLD.
[1] ICB acquired by Afilias, Afilias acquired by Donuts, Donuts rebranded to Identity Digital.
The ccTLD for Mauritius is .mu. The e British Indian Ocean territories stop existing once the UK releases its claims to the territories so there goes the country code of "io"
The country codes used for ccTLDs are arbitrary, I thought: they're roughly consistent with ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes but not exactly. Are there precedents to suggest a country can only have one ccTLD?
No, there's lots of counterexamples that are typically designed around subregions or territories (I understand there are nuances here, but this sets the general spirit of when this happens). The UK has .uk and .gb, US has .us and had .um , Austrailia has .au, .cx (Christmas Island), .cc (Cocos/Keeling Islands)
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.
Do people really think ICANN will make a large number of popular startups/websites/apps unusable overnight based on a technicality? That's not how the world works. .io has a globally recognized registrar and they will continue doing business as they do today.
I don't think they'd do it overnight, but I can absolutely see them locking future registrations and setting an expiration date.
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.
Lots of people lost their domains when .tk (and the many other free domains) died and got reborn.
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.
Do people really think ICANN will make a large number of popular startups/websites/apps unusable overnight based on a technicality? That's not how the world works.
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.
It could well morph into "MIOT", maintaining the CC for the benefit of Mauritian citizens. After all, western interests have already extracted benefits from their land for decades, it would be only just that they get to keep some of those benefits forever. Indians didn't demolish all buildings and railroads built for British benefit, they just repurposed for their own; the same should probably happen here.
Well, my employers have a Mauritian domain. I shall have to volunteer to scope out the Mauritian tech scene, which, to be fair, I've heard positive things about before. So now I will have to do my research justice and attend in person.
This is an excellent plan and will doubtless pay long-term dividends for your employer who would be wise to fully fund your research. However do be aware that the μTech scene is largely a closed shop, and you shouldn't expect to make serious connections on your first visit. It's likely that you'll need to be there for at least a week every six months, perhaps for two or three years.
I think it warrants establishing a permanent base of operations, running continuous training sessions for the benefit of the whole company. Obviously I'm talking about on-site training, which is much more beneficial than remote courses.
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.
.su is administered by the Russian national registry, because Russia is de facto the Soviet Union’s successor state. In this case, though, would .io stay with the UK or come under Mauritian control? It’s not clear.
Like the other remnants of the British Empire, the British Indian Ocean Territory was never a part of the UK. It was just land that we (the UK) expropriated from Mauritius at independence. A just solution would be for Mauritius, as the (now) actual successor state, to control dot-io.
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.
> I was surprised to discover that Ascension even has a ccTLD
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).
Turning dot-io into a gTLD is certainly seems like the best course of action, but I think it's far from likely that ICANN will do that considering that there are no other two-letter gTLDs.
There are not that many two letter codes (a comment said 26*26= 676) and they are reserved for country codes. Global tlds are three letters and up (eg com org etc)
Well, this one is special, by virtue of being in widespread commercial use.
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.
> In this case, though, would .io stay with the UK or come under Mauritian control? It’s not clear.
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).
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.
ccTLDs other than .su have been retired when the country they represented ceased to exist or got renamed. .zr, .tp, .cs (twice?) according to [0]
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.
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).
> 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 [...]
Isn't the Internet already a "loosely coupled set of affiliated networks", with each AS being a separate network?
Yes -- to some degree. And "AS" could mean "BGP AS" or it could mean "country or alliance of countries" -- the internet as seen in the west vs iran are likely very different things.
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 [email protected]@@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.
> The US-UK base will remain on Diego Garcia – a key factor enabling the deal to go forward at a time of growing geopolitical rivalries in the region between Western countries, India, and China.
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.
> Chagosians will finally be allowed to go back to their homes.
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).
> might allow the US to station nuclear weapons there (which it probably currently does)
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.
Protection is not just about military matters - it's about relationships. Mauritius will likely want to push other stuff at the UN level, bid for money from international bodies, etc etc... US help in those matters will be valuable.
The .io TLD will disappear, but given its huge use I expect ICANN to allow an especially long transition period.
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.
The UK will be retaining a 99 year lease on Diego Garcia, so I imagine .io can still be referring to that for another hundred years or so; in a similar way to how .hk still exists, and existed at all.
Perhaps I'm just too cynical but I always see the movement from some more 'obscure' domain name to a 'household' .com / .net as a graduation of sorts.
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.
Their lead argument is "because colonialism", which is not a persuasive argument unless you have an ideological axe to grind. In general, people don't give a shit about upholding historical grievances or whatever, they simply want to get things done.
I will not be baited into discussing what people care and not care about but I will note there was a mass migration from the "master" branch to "main" branch. Food for thought.
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.
I feel like some of you are going to run for politics in a few decades and owning a .io domain with no residence or operation in that part of the world, while technically not wrong at the time, will be the seen with the same disdain as blackface, cultural appropriation, or wearing a Nazi uniform to a Halloween party.
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.
The fact that, as you say, "it's just a military base" is the consequence of the forced eviction of the local population (around 1,500 people) in 1968 by the US and the UK.
That’s not a lot of people. More people probably lost their homes to Hurricane Helene just this past couple of weeks. And the average Mauritian wasn’t even born in 1968.
Saigon fell in 1975. Millions of people fled the country in fear for their lives or gave up their children, with hundreds of thousands dying in the process. The fall of South Vietnam was a humanitarian catastrophe on a monumental scale, and basically no one cares about it anymore. And you’re expecting me to care about 1500 people being peacefully resettled from one island to another? All of this handwringing is a disingenuous excuse to vilify Britain and the West in general from the very same people who sympathize and make excuses for the Vietnamese communists even to this day.
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.
That is not possible. However it's possible that "not much" will happen, but the .io domain would have to move to the control of another country with the current rules in place. For historic precedent on this you can look at the .yu domain which was forcefully transferred to Serbia (more precisely FR Yugoslavia) when Slovenia did not want to give it up.
I don't think it's very likely that it will be retired given the state of .su.
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].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41730559
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain#...
There was also a .um for US minor outlying islands, removed in 2008.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.an
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.cs
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.
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...
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".
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.
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.
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_...
[2] https://www.iso.org/iso-3166-country-codes.html
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...
[2] https://www.biot.gov.io/about/history/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1#Criteria_for_inclus...
Some 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)
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.
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.
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
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
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.yu
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41730559
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.
[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...
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.
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.
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...
https://hackernoon.com/stop-using-io-domain-names-for-produc...
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).
And if you boot up a machine from 10+ years ago, many sites won't work because they require TLS1.2+.
Nothing lasts forever :-/
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 [email protected]@@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
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).
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.
https://www.drawio.com/blog/move-diagrams-net
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.
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.