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Comment by andyjohnson0

6 months ago

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.

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andyjohnson0

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ifwinterco  6 months ago

This isn't quite true for Ascension or the Falkland Islands, they were both uninhabited when discovered and they're not part of any existing country

  • andyjohnson0  6 months ago

    I'm not sure of the point you're making.

    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.

    • toyg  6 months ago

      > 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).

chippiewill  6 months ago

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.