Comment by amiga386

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.