Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the Chagos Islands?

I can't be the only person who read this and was curious about what other ccTLDs have existed and have since been removed, so here's the list of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain#...

There was also a .um for US minor outlying islands, removed in 2008.

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.

That's not entirely true. .su is an exceptional reservation but it's not the only one with a tld. For instance ".uk" exists and ".ac" exists.

It's absolutely possible that someone will asking for an exceptional reservation for IO at ISO and it can be kept alive forever.

It doesn’t matter really what ICANN decides if the registrars ignore it.

Perhaps naive question: why can't they simply convert it from a ccTLD to a gTLD?

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.

As fun as the .io TLD is, its entire sordid history is a shitshow.

It's a novelty TLD, and anyone who used it expecting stability should have looked for a different flag of convenience.

Won't the hedge fund have to acquiesce to the ICANN if it demands that .Io be shut down? Afaik, ICANN only allows two letter domains for countries.

Alternatively ICANN might (should imo) transfer the TLD registrar to Mauritius.

It doesn't really track that the original creation of .io being sordid means a political change won't have implications, (possibly even) modelled on and/or justified by the questionable history..

[flagged]

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.

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.

This one needs to come back. It's been over twenty years, any legacy services that are calling out to .oz instead of .au are probably in need of a good crash these days anyway.

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

https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/12/24071036/queer-af-mastodo...

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).

How does using these TLDs exploit "3rd world people"?

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166#ISO_3166_Maintenance_...

[2] https://www.iso.org/iso-3166-country-codes.html

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)

https://www.iso.org/iso-3166-country-codes.html

Since the list was originally developed for post, there's precedent for far-flung regions of a country to have their own codes, even when they're not considered politically separate. French Guiana, for example, is considered fully part of France, and yet it has its own code (GF).

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.

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

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".

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.

Until

.su still exists, so there's precedent for keeping a "legacy" ccTLD of a non-existing entity.

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.

TIL that the USSR had its own TLD. As a child, I always thought .su domains were specifically for warez uses.

It's actually kinda crazy that it has been kept. I personally think resolvers should not resolve that zone at all.

Hey now, it's also popular for some kinds of piracy, it's not all hate crimes! Plus, I think there are a few pun-oriented domain names that use .su?

I was always disappointed it didn't acquire a "regional" sort of appeal for businesses serving the CIS/former Soviet states, sort of like when they started to sell .eu domains towards an audience that wanted to imply "we're not just a .de or .fr company".

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?

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?

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.

> 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).

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.

If they do move forward with this, I think going forward companies will be much more cautious before getting a vanity domain.

I lost a bunch of .tk I was paying for. They were one of the few that supported emoji domains.

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.

[flagged]

> 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?

Even plain ol' HTTP (no S) is slowly dying.

And if you boot up a machine from 10+ years ago, many sites won't work because they require TLS1.2+.

Nothing lasts forever :-/

> 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.

An alternative view is that grandpa thinks .com is the internet, the same way he thinks that Chrome is the internet.

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.

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.

And blackface is just a costume. I think there's some necessary context to understand GP's comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Chagossians

I think you don’t realize how bad this sounds. Like, have you wondered why it’s “just a military base”?

"What do you mean, 'you people' ? "