I doubt this will happen, but they should just reassign it to the Mauritius authority. The citizens of the islands could then potentially see some benefit from it, not Google or ICANN or whoever selflessly offers to take it over.

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On October 3, the British government announced that it was giving up sovereignty over a small tropical atoll in the Indian Ocean known as the Chagos Islands. The islands would be handed over to the neighboring island country of Mauritius, about 1,100 miles off the southeastern coast of Africa.

The story did not make the tech press, but perhaps it should have. The decision to transfer the islands to their new owner will result in the loss of one of the tech and gaming industry’s preferred top-level domains: .io.

Whether it’s Github.io, gaming site itch.io, or even Google I/O (which arguably kicked off the trend in 2008), .io has been a constant presence in the tech lexicon. Its popularity is sometimes explained by how it represents the abbreviation for “input/output,” or the data received and processed by any system. What’s not often acknowledged is that it’s more than a quippy domain. It’s a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) related to a nation—meaning it involves politics far beyond the digital world.

Since 1968, the UK and U.S have operated a major military base on the Chagos Islands (officially known as the British Indian Ocean Territory) , but the neighboring nation of Mauritius has always disputed British sovereignty over them. The Mauritian government has long argued that the British illegally retained control when Mauritius gained independence. It has taken over 50 years, but that dispute has finally been resolved. In return for a 99-year lease for the military base, the islands will become part of Mauritius.

Once this treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist. Various international bodies will update their records. In particular, the International Standard for Organization (ISO) will remove country code “IO” from its specification. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which creates and delegates top-level domains, uses this specification to determine which top-level country domains should exist. Once IO is removed, the IANA will refuse to allow any new registrations with a .io domain. It will also automatically begin the process of retiring existing ones. (There is no official count of the number of extant .io domains.)

Officially, .io—and countless websites—will disappear. At a time when domains can go for millions of dollars, it’s a shocking reminder that there are forces outside of the internet that still affect our digital lives.

When domains outlive countries

The removal of an entire country or territory from the world map is incredibly rare, so one might ask why the process for deleting a domain is so clearly documented. So automatic. So…final.

The answer is simple: history.

There are two organizations responsible for domains and internet addresses. The IANA decides what should and shouldn’t be a top-level domain, such as .com, .org, .uk, or .nz. The organization originated at the University of Southern California, although it was only formalized in 1994, when it won a contract put out by the U.S. It operated for several years as a small research and management committee. As the internet grew, it became clear that a more formal setup was required. By 1998, the IANA became part of a new organization: the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN, based in the U.S., was given the broader responsibility of overseeing the operational stability of the internet and ensuring international interests were represented.

These two organizations might seem like they have mundane roles. But they have found themselves making some of the hardest decisions on the global internet.

On September 19, 1990, the IANA created and delegated the top-level domain .su to the USSR. Just six weeks later, the Berlin Wall fell, and the chain of events that would lead to the collapse of the USSR began. At the time, nobody thought about what should happen with the .su domain—the internet as we know it was still years away. So the .su domain was handed to Russia to operate alongside its own (.ru). The Russian government agreed that it would eventually be shut down, but no clear rules around its governance or when that should happen were defined.

But ambiguity is the worst thing for a top-level domain. Unknowingly, this decision created an environment in which .su became a digital wild west. Today, it is a barely policed top-level domain, a plausibly deniable home for Russian dark ops and a place where supremacist content and cyber-crime have found cover.

A few years later, in 1992, the IANA learned a similarly harsh lesson at the end of the Balkans War, which saw the breakup of Yugoslavia into several smaller states. In its aftermath, the joint nation of Serbia and Montenegro attempted to adopt the name “Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.” Slovenia and Croatia objected, claiming that it implied Serbia and Montenegro were Yugoslavia’s legitimate successors. The two countries protested to the UN.

As the international issue over Serbia and Montenegro’s name rumbled on throughout the early nineties, the IANA remained unsure about who should control .yu, Yugoslavia’s top-level domain. Email access and the internet were now integral to research and international discussions, and the IANA’s ambiguity led to an extraordinary act of academic espionage.

According to the journalist Kaloyan Kolev, Slovenian academics traveled to Serbia at the end of 1992. Their destination was the University of Belgrade in the country’s capital. On arrival, they broke into the university and stole all the hosting software and domain records for the .yu top-level domain—everything they needed to seize control. For the next two years, the .yu domain was unofficially operated by ARNES (Academic and Research Network of Slovenia), which repeatedly denied its involvement in the original heist. ARNES rejected all requests by Serbian institutions for new domains, severely limiting the country’s ability to participate in the growing internet community. The situation became so messy that, in 1994, IANA founding manager Jon Postel personally stepped in and overrode IANA regulations, forcibly transferring ownership of the .yu domain back to the University of Belgrade.

In 2006, Montenegro declared independence from Serbia. With the digital revolution now firmly underway, the IANA was determined not to let chaos reign once again. It created two new top-level domains: .rs for Serbia and .me for Montenegro. Both were issued on the requirement that .yu would officially be terminated. It would take until 2010 for this to happen, but the IANA eventually got its way. Burned by the experience, the organization laid down the new, stricter set of rules and timescales for top-level domain expiration that exist today.

It’s these rules that will soon apply to the .io domain. They are firm, and they are clear. Once the country code no longer exists, the domain must cease to exist, too, ideally within three to five years. Like a tenant being told that their landlord is selling up and they must move, every individual and company who uses a .io domain will be told the same.

The endurance of physical history

.io has become popular with startups, particularly those involved in crypto. These are businesses that often identify with one of the original principles of the internet—that cyberspace grants a form of independence to those who use it. Yet it is the long tail of real-world history that might force on them a major change.

The IANA may fudge its own rules and allow .io to continue to exist. Money talks, and there is a lot of it tied up in .io domains. However, the history of the USSR and Yugoslavia still looms large, and the IANA may feel that playing fast and loose with top-level domains will only come back to haunt it.

Whatever happens, 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.

Anyone else potentially see a problem in which a single organization oversees all name usage and can arbitrarily decide to break a good majority of the internet over stupid shit like this? Or are we all just fine with a single American based entity being able to decide what domains are valid and not?

This is just yet another “fuck you” to the Chagossians, for whom it could have been the next best thing to reparations if they were given control of it.

This is about .io being a country code and that country ceasing to exist, so .io will be retired. I say who the fuck cares, release the kracken .io.

Tangentially related, but I love how http://ai is an actual website that you can visit. We’re so used to thinking of websites as <something>.<tld> that it’s really weird to see a website hosted directly on a top level domain with no subdomain.

at the same time they’re allowing any tld to who’s willing to fork $100k per year. So just sell the management of the tld

As much as I understand that some tiny countries need every source of income they can get, I still firmly believe that regional TLDs should only get to be used by users relevant to that region. Or else they just have no meaning at all.

That was my mini rant. Thanks for attending. That is all.

But ambiguity is the worst thing for a top-level domain. Unknowingly, this decision created an environment in which .su became a digital wild west. Today, it is a barely policed top-level domain, a plausibly deniable home for Russian dark ops and a place where supremacist content and cyber-crime have found cover.

So much drama.

“Supremacist content”, “dark ops”, “cyber-crime”.

“The free world” has recently equated itself to Hitler at least two more times, and somebody’s worried that there are places with less censorship.

Also my anecdotal experience with .su domains is better than with .ru domains.

Someone please delete .cx

In a way, I understand, .yu was removed years ago for instance. Here it is because .io is pretty special for geek and all

Yeah, and this, right here, is a huge reason why I don’t buy vanity domains based on country codes. Political structures can change quickly, and I really don’t want to have to rebrand something just because some country decides it wants to restrict its country-code TLDs (e.g. the .ml TLD is owned by Mali, and they could totally push to restrict it to Malian residents).

I stick with the normal ones, like .com, .info, or .org, or content-specific ones like .games.

Internet journalism means you can sensationalize hypotheticals like “The IANA may fudge its own rules” and “Money talks” without having to provide a source for those claims.

And why should I be careful choosing a TLD or interpret this as a warning? The Internet isn’t breaking, it’s changing. All this does is fear monger in favor of one Pope of the Internet.