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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.
Kinda ironic this is published to a website with a
.toccTLD for the Kingdom of Tonga.Or more likely, they will just move the domain to be a generic TLD instead of a country code TLD, due to it’s popularity in the tech space.
Kind of good in a way. It was always colonialism for tech companies to be using it anyway, when it wasn’t meant for them.
I mean IANA or whatever literally made up a standard where two letter TLDs were reserved for countries even if they aren’t how those countries refer to themselves, see gr for Greece. I’m assuming .io just stands for Indian Ocean in this case, which seems like probably not how the chagosans self identify. Then you have countries like Montenegro that have .me and realized it means something in English so capitalized on it by licensing a company to resell .me domains.
I don’t think I have any particular point other than I think it’s dumb to have a system of artificial scarcity be the only alternative to having to remember the IP of every damn site I want to use.
I’m assuming .io just stands for Indian Ocean in this case
British Indian Ocean Territory, it was just shortened to .io so it would fit into the naming scheme.
If IANA has all two letter domains reserved for countries, than why is there no .uk?
That’s a great question and the answer can be found in the wikipedia entry for the .uk domain.
In a nutshell the volunteer “Naming Committee” setup back in 1985 established a rule that entities needed to register into specific subdomains based on entity type such as .co, where the .co part stood for “Company”. They did this to make managing registrations easier and to provide an “at a glance” way to see what kind of website you were visiting (commercial, government, charity, etc). The “Naming Committee” was extremely strict about ensuring that domains were registered to a specific entity and in the correct subdomain.
By the mid-90s the volunteer “Naming Committee” was entirely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of domains being registered so that volunteer group was replaced by Nominet UK. Nominet didn’t open the .uk TLD to registration until 2014 and by then the subdomain thing (.co.uk) was so embedded into the United Kingdom’s internet structure that it had become tradition and NOT using was confusing to many people.
There’s more subdomains than just .co as well and both wikipedia articles I linked list them.
tl;dr .uk absolutely exists in the UK, it’s just used differently than almost anywhere else in the world.
Canada uses gc.ca for federal government sites, and I think every province gets their own, too, like .bc.ca (but I don’t know if they all use them.)
There is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk
There’s no .uk and there never was!
i’ve seen a lot of .uk sites around
i’d rather they return chagos to the islanders
I don’t really know anything about Chagos, but is that really what the islanders want? A quick google suggests the islanders might find it difficult to agree.
Most micro island nations just aren’t viable as a sovereign nation in 2024. They need air travel, health services, telecommunications, building materials, food imports, education, et cetera. Sadly they just aren’t able to produce anything of any value with which to pay for all of those things.
In many cases they end up trading their sovereignty for political positions. It looks like there’s already a detention centre for sri lankans in Chagos. China will happily pay then millions a year for them not to recognise Taiwan as a sovereign state, which is kinda ironic.
Nauru is a fairly interesting island nation. They sold the rights to their phosphate (bird poo) 80 (?) some years ago, and after it was extracted they were left with a moon scape. Sadly they squandered the money with some comically bad investments, including a broadway production IIRC. Health outcomes are pretty terrible.
It looks like there’s already a military base in Chagos, so I guess that’s something they can trade on.
Another problem with sovereignty is migration rights. If you’re born somewhere like that you would absolutely want the opportunity to go to university in Australia or UK or similar.
i think at the very least the chagossians would like to be included in negotiations instead of having their islands traded between the UK and Mauritius without their involvement
Corporations with loads of money will ensure that this domain will simply get reclassified.
Can they do that? I thought all two letter TLDs were reserved for ccTLDs only. It’ll be interesting to see how things play out.
Perhaps not an actual reclassification since, until now, all two letter TLDs have been exclusively for countries. But for the right price, I imagine convincing them to maintain the two character TLD… for “posterity” … and… “backwards compatibility”…
coughs, clears throat, and pushes 💰 across the table
…would make sense.
😏
I know it’s not the same thing, but the corporate TLDs like “.google” make me irrationally irritated. You think you’re too good for “.com”?
☝🏽
“Oh, perhaps we could assign it to the actual Indian Ocean, as that’s quite a persuasive 💰 argument 💰.”
“… Or perhaps NASA would like to administer it on behalf of the aliens on Io until we make contact…”
