8 ms·

The dark side of .io

298 points by zactral 12y ago

jim_dnaley 12y ago
Good article - the control of the infrastructure of the internet is a large problem today. For historical context, I suggest looking into Paul Garrin's project Name.Space - it highlights the often-invisible control of TLDs and DNSs by companies close to their respective governments (often granted sole control over their market). Although Name.Space was more pertinent while Network Solutions still held a monopoly over domain registration, it seems like the same kind of problem continues today. About Name.Space: http://namespace.us/about.php http://namespace.us/about.php A good interview of Paul Garrin can be found here: http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9805/msg00058.html http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9805/msg0005...
hansjorg 12y ago
Interestingly, the UK cabinet and parliament had no official hand in the actual decision to expel. When the US requested the forced expulsion of the Chagossians, the Queen could act unilaterally since she is still the direct ruler of the British Indian Ocean Territory.
- jlangenauer 12y ago
  I would be extremely shocked if this was actually the case. Do you have any source for this claim?
  - hansjorg 12y ago
    I might me misremembering it, but I think this was told in the documentary Stealing a Nation [1]. According to Wikipedia, there is a commissioner with the Foreign Office that acts as administrator, but that commissioner is directly appointed by the Queen [2]. 1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing_a_Nation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing_a_Nation 2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_the_British_Indian_Ocean_Territory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_the_British_India...
    - M2Ys4U 12y ago
      >directly appointed by the Queen While this may be technically true, the monarch's powers (the royal prerogatives[0]) are almost exclusively exercised on the advice of the prime minister/cabinet. In other words, while the power officially rests with the Queen, the UK government is the one to wield it in practice. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_prerogative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_prerogative
jessaustin 12y ago
The British High Court ruled in 2000 that they could do so, but the government ordered the ruling overturned... Haha I can think of a few leaders of other nations who might enjoy this power. Of course I have sympathy for refugees of all sorts. However, although the Chagossians were definitely screwed out of their home, it doesn't follow that they have been screwed out of ".io" money. It is an accident of history that TLDs are relatively scarce, that national governments may extract economic rents from TLDs, that some ccTLDs have no corresponding national government, and that the UK happens to own ".io". Nothing any Chagossian ever did entitles her or her descendants to this money. In a better world than ours, there would be billions of TLDs, and the value of any one of them would be negligible.
- 13 12y ago
  We already have thousands of top level domains and it's utterly ridiculous. People with trademarks have an obligation to protect their mark or risk losing it. Depending how you read that, it can involve buying hundreds of different variations on your brand name under different top levels. Some of them even appear to be trying to capitalize on brand protection behavior; companies will feel compelled to purchase .gripe for example to stop it hosting negative content about them. $ whois apple.gripe Registrant Organization: Apple Inc. Registrant Email: domains@apple.com See?
  - jessaustin 12y ago
    IANAL, and I'm not responsible for poor legal advice that I haven't even given. The elimination of stupid corporate lawyer bullshit like this would be but one of the benefits of a non-scarce TLD regime. If keeping a trademark required spending many billions of dollars every year, either firms would make do without trademark, or the law would recognize that "apple.gripe" doesn't mean anything about Apple Computer's trademarks.
    - smt88 12y ago
      Trademarks are useful. They let you know that you're buying from the person you intend to buy from. Imagine a world without trademarks. The US would be flooded with iPhone knockoffs, and all of them would be identical to iPhones. They'd have god-knows-what inside them, but they'd bear the Apple logo. Or, imagine you want to pay your American Express bill. Unfortunately, someone has bought AmericanExpress.card, and you get confused. You end up inputting your AmEx login info into a phishing site and give a hacker your personal data. In a world without trademarks, Apple and American Express wouldn't have the legal authority to pursue people that are imitating them.
lsiebert 12y ago
Ugh... So the British Colonial Chief, in 1966, wrote “Unfortunately along with the birds go some few Tarzans or Man Fridays whose origins are obscure and who are hopefully being wished on to Mauritius.” And from the Wikileaks cable: 'He asserted that establishing a marine park would, in effect, put paid to resettlement claims of the archipelago's former residents. Responding to Polcouns' observation that the advocates of Chagossian resettlement continue to vigorously press their case, Roberts opined that the UK's "environmental lobby is far more powerful than the Chagossians' advocates." ' That's just ugly and wrong.
chrisfosterelli 12y ago
While the actual story is a terrible human rights violation, I don't see how this is related to .IO domains in the least. I think most people that purchase/visit an .IO domain have little idea what geological place is tied to it. It sounds like the money goes to the British government to use as they see fit, and I doubt many people would have a problem with that in the first place if it wasn't in this unfortunate geopolitcal context.
- stefantalpalaru 12y ago
  See no evil, hear no evil?
jordanpg 12y ago
It is surreal reading this. The geographic connections between ccTLDs and their associated 2-letter pairs with their English connotations are completely arbitrary. ICANN could have just as easily decided to issue all 26*26 two-letter TLDs according to some other scheme.
- geographomics 12y ago
  It's not completely arbitrary, it's mostly based on ISO 3166 which is in turn derived from the names of countries. So on the contrary, it was a very deliberate assignment of two letter codes to territories. If the islanders had not been forcibly displaced in the 1960s, they would most probably have been had some say in the governance of .io, as other British overseas territories have done for their respective domains.
  - rustyfe 12y ago
    That isn't what he said was arbitrary though. The argument was that the pairing is arbitrary. So there's a justifiable reason why this island would have the .io TLD, but no justifiable reason why that is also an acronym for Input/Output. There's no particular reason .tv is Tuvalu and also Television. It just worked out that way and some acronyms are more valuable than others.
  - dingaling 12y ago
    > it's mostly based on ISO 3166 which is in turn derived from the names of countries. The mostly is significant; in several cases the ISO was over-ridden and arbitrary but sensible codes assigned e.g. UK instead of GB. Many smaller territories were not granted codes in ISO3166 and had to be 'invented' for the TLDs ISO3166 is in itself a bit of a mess, and since it became used for TLDs there have been dozens of requests for changes and additions based on new TLD assignments.
    - M2Ys4U 12y ago
      .uk was the first ccTLD, and the assignment precedes the decision to use ISO-3166
majc2 12y ago
John Pilger's "Stealing a Nation" documentary goes into the Chagos Islands in quite a lot of detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zhGvId4fcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zhGvId4fcc
- kiliancs 12y ago
  Thanks! I also recommend it.
notastartup 12y ago
I picked up http://getleads.io http://getleads.io for only $40, it was ridiculously easier than I thought because somehow I remembered .io domains as being expensive. Seems like the competition has brought down the prices quite a bit in the past few years.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  $40 is expensive for a domain.
  - bbcbasic 12y ago
    yes .bit is much cheaper!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
kijin 12y ago
Okay, this is going to be controversial, but I have no problem whatsoever with moving people around like this, as long as: 1) the displaced people are adequately compensated for their loss, and 2) they are given freedom to move to a place where they can enjoy human rights and make an adequate living. The right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates is not a human right. This applies at every scale from a single building demolished to make way for a highway, to an entire country's worth of refugees. So the big problem is not that Britain evicted the Chagossians and is refusing to let them back. That was just a case of eminent domain. The problem is that Britain and Mauritius never properly compensated them and didn't ensure that they could make a living in their new home. If redistributing the profits from .io to these people would make goddess of justice smile, fine, let's do it. But enough with the "it's my ancestral home!" bullshit. As the article mentions, the Chagossians weren't even the "native" or "original" population of the islands. The French had enslaved them and brought them there by force, and the rest were migrant workers from India. None of them had any right to claim those islands as their home, except that they happened to live there at the time when Britain decided to vacate the islands. In fact, none of us have any right to claim any piece of real estate as our own. The law, of course, grants certain people certain rights with respect to land, for the sake of convenience and economic efficiency. But morally, it's all arbitrary. Why does it matter whether someone has lived on a piece of land for three generations or three hundred? What about nomadic peoples who claim a large swath of land but only use parts of it sporadically? Besides, virtually all habitable land on Earth has been conquered multiple times by different groups of people, all of whom might have some sort of claim on that land. Whenever we hear about some group of people who complain that their house, village, country, etc. was taken from them, the location in question rarely has anything more than sentimental value for the oldest members of that group. What really matters are human rights (e.g. right to participate in the governance of whatever territory they happen to live in) and the ability to make a stable living. Without those, returning the land to them won't make their circumstances any better. Nostalgia doesn't put food on your table. On the other hand, once you have rights and a stable occupation, over time you learn to stop fussing about your location. The idea that some people have some sort of god-given right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates has caused so much bloodshed, unnecessary grief, and opportunity for ideologues to take advantage of innocent people throughout human history. Can't we just stop doing that already?
russellbeattie 12y ago
Sooo... what? This is easily the third or fourth time this has been linked to in Hacker News. What relevance does it have to anything? Everyone who uses .io domains are horrible, insensitive people? Those who use .me domains should be forever ashamed of the various human rights violations of the Montenegrin government in 1995? Anyone who uses bit.ly is basically insulting the victims of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing? Etc. etc. It's just stupidity, and given the vast numbers of gTLDs which are coming online every day, completely forgotten about relatively shortly.
- hoprocker 12y ago
  Another thing I've wondered about with suffix-hopping is the guarantee of stability there is -- in example, using the Libyan domain .ly in light of the recent radical changes. (An associated meta-question being, of course, if this is really the most important thing to worry about in relationship to Libya.) edit Whoops, I meant Libya.
  - disordr 12y ago
    This is what I have wondered for a long time.
- tarminian 12y ago
  First time I've seen it. I think it has a lot of relevance, we all need to think more about the things we purchase. That chocolate bar you just ate was probably produced using slave labor, those new cool shoes, made with sweat shop labor by young girls. To just brush off articles like this is insensitive.
  - cbd1984 12y ago
    If everyone's guilty, it means nobody is. If everyone has something they did, didn't do, or didn't stop which implicates them in being a horrible human being, all it becomes is an endless cycle of "well, you did that" "oh, and you didn't do that" which completely distracts from any honest effort to fix the underlying problems.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
mrfrisby 12y ago
This thread is a depressingly self-serving reflection of this community. Few of you seem to have bothered to do anything but skim the article and come to a snap judgement based on what seems to be your idealised notion of how TLDs should be managed. For the sake of my own sanity, lets just be clear here: 1. An island chain was forcibly depopulated in order for the largest land mass to be leased to the United States as a strategically important military base away from outside observers which has since been used as a staging post for the renditions of people to illegal prisons on US sovereign territory. 2. The former inhabitants of the Island are prevented from returning thanks to a tricky piece of political gamesmanship which classfieid the island chain as a marine park unable to sustain human population, whilst at the same time permitting the construction and continuous growth of one of the United States largest overseas military bases. 3. The Chagossians - now living in slums in Mauritius - or even worse - Kent, have limited access to education, die younger than they ought to, and are prevented from prospering in exile thanks to their ill treatment at the hands of the Mauritian government, the same government paid to help Britain pave the way for the above heinous acts. 4. The natural resources of the islands, the land, the sea, the soil, the strategically important geographic position, the TLD, the international dialling code, the airspace - all of this was stolen when the people were forcibly removed. You may discuss the merits of TLD sovereignty somewhere else, this is not the issue at hand here. If Britain can sell and profit from .uk domain names, the Chagossians deserve that same right as equals. This is not about a TLD, it is about the abhorrent treatment of a small nation at the hands of a large one. It is the grossest example of the same kind of tawdry crap which colonial powers of past and present have gotten away with for centuries. Your ignorance and self-serving positions are staggering, disappointing, and completely unsurprising.
- frozenport 12y ago
  I don't find it pragmatic to revise history, I don't believe the Native Americans should get .us
  - chrislgrigg 12y ago
    This situation doesn't really seem like it's "history" in the same sense, considering it happened so recently, governments are still actively working against them as they attempt repatriation, and the TLD issue is fresh.
chrislgrigg 12y ago
If nothing else, it would be nice if learning about this inspired those who own .io domains to contribute to a fund for the Chagossian people. I'd certainly match the $60 I paid to register my domain to a support organization if I could find one that looked legit.
iLoch 12y ago
Perhaps a good starting point would be allowing me to sign a petition when I order a .io domain. Obviously this would require action by large domain providers, but it would be a good way to raise awareness I think.
kiliancs 12y ago
It's very sad to see more examples of nations with power taking advantage of smaller nations, but I'm aware there are more cases than we'll probably be able to find out about. To me cases such as this one should be resolved based on universal principles that are sadly ignored, such as that all nations should treat each other as equal and see themselves as parts of a greater community whose best interest should be always a priority. Justice can only be made if it's based on solid principles.
donmb 12y ago
I don't own a .io domain although thought about it several times. At least now I know I will not buy one. Thanks HN.
jahewson 12y ago
There's an obvious flaw in this argument. The .io domain is a British invention, it only exists because of the decision to separate the islands from Mauritius. Had the US not wanted a military base, then the Chagos Islands would be part of Mauritius and have a .mu domain. Had history unfolded as the OP wanted then .io would simply not exist. Alternatively, if the islands were to become independent in the future then they would no longer be the British Indian Ocean Territory, by definition, and likewise have no logical claim on (or even need for) the .io domain. It's easy to feel sorry for these people, but it's hard to see how they have a claim on something which was never theirs and is an administrative construct of a territory which they never lived in, which would ultimately be abolished in some future ideal world. Given the article's many complaints about the U.S. military and the CIA, I can't help thinking that the OP might have a more compelling case for boycotting .com domains.

298 points by zactral 12y ago

Good article - the control of the infrastructure of the internet is a large problem today. For historical context, I suggest looking into Paul Garrin's project Name.Space - it highlights the often-invisible control of TLDs and DNSs by companies close to their respective governments (often granted sole control over their market). Although Name.Space was more pertinent while Network Solutions still held a monopoly over domain registration, it seems like the same kind of problem continues today. About Name.Space: http://namespace.us/about.php http://namespace.us/about.php A good interview of Paul Garrin can be found here: http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9805/msg00058.html http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9805/msg0005...

hansjorg 12y ago

Interestingly, the UK cabinet and parliament had no official hand in the actual decision to expel. When the US requested the forced expulsion of the Chagossians, the Queen could act unilaterally since she is still the direct ruler of the British Indian Ocean Territory.

jlangenauer 12y ago
I would be extremely shocked if this was actually the case. Do you have any source for this claim?
- hansjorg 12y ago
  I might me misremembering it, but I think this was told in the documentary Stealing a Nation [1]. According to Wikipedia, there is a commissioner with the Foreign Office that acts as administrator, but that commissioner is directly appointed by the Queen [2]. 1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing_a_Nation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing_a_Nation 2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_the_British_Indian_Ocean_Territory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_the_British_India...
  - M2Ys4U 12y ago
    >directly appointed by the Queen While this may be technically true, the monarch's powers (the royal prerogatives[0]) are almost exclusively exercised on the advice of the prime minister/cabinet. In other words, while the power officially rests with the Queen, the UK government is the one to wield it in practice. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_prerogative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_prerogative

jessaustin 12y ago

The British High Court ruled in 2000 that they could do so, but the government ordered the ruling overturned... Haha I can think of a few leaders of other nations who might enjoy this power. Of course I have sympathy for refugees of all sorts. However, although the Chagossians were definitely screwed out of their home, it doesn't follow that they have been screwed out of ".io" money. It is an accident of history that TLDs are relatively scarce, that national governments may extract economic rents from TLDs, that some ccTLDs have no corresponding national government, and that the UK happens to own ".io". Nothing any Chagossian ever did entitles her or her descendants to this money. In a better world than ours, there would be billions of TLDs, and the value of any one of them would be negligible.

13 12y ago
We already have thousands of top level domains and it's utterly ridiculous. People with trademarks have an obligation to protect their mark or risk losing it. Depending how you read that, it can involve buying hundreds of different variations on your brand name under different top levels. Some of them even appear to be trying to capitalize on brand protection behavior; companies will feel compelled to purchase .gripe for example to stop it hosting negative content about them. $ whois apple.gripe Registrant Organization: Apple Inc. Registrant Email: domains@apple.com See?
- jessaustin 12y ago
  IANAL, and I'm not responsible for poor legal advice that I haven't even given. The elimination of stupid corporate lawyer bullshit like this would be but one of the benefits of a non-scarce TLD regime. If keeping a trademark required spending many billions of dollars every year, either firms would make do without trademark, or the law would recognize that "apple.gripe" doesn't mean anything about Apple Computer's trademarks.
  - smt88 12y ago
    Trademarks are useful. They let you know that you're buying from the person you intend to buy from. Imagine a world without trademarks. The US would be flooded with iPhone knockoffs, and all of them would be identical to iPhones. They'd have god-knows-what inside them, but they'd bear the Apple logo. Or, imagine you want to pay your American Express bill. Unfortunately, someone has bought AmericanExpress.card, and you get confused. You end up inputting your AmEx login info into a phishing site and give a hacker your personal data. In a world without trademarks, Apple and American Express wouldn't have the legal authority to pursue people that are imitating them.

lsiebert 12y ago

Ugh... So the British Colonial Chief, in 1966, wrote “Unfortunately along with the birds go some few Tarzans or Man Fridays whose origins are obscure and who are hopefully being wished on to Mauritius.” And from the Wikileaks cable: 'He asserted that establishing a marine park would, in effect, put paid to resettlement claims of the archipelago's former residents. Responding to Polcouns' observation that the advocates of Chagossian resettlement continue to vigorously press their case, Roberts opined that the UK's "environmental lobby is far more powerful than the Chagossians' advocates." ' That's just ugly and wrong.

chrisfosterelli 12y ago

While the actual story is a terrible human rights violation, I don't see how this is related to .IO domains in the least. I think most people that purchase/visit an .IO domain have little idea what geological place is tied to it. It sounds like the money goes to the British government to use as they see fit, and I doubt many people would have a problem with that in the first place if it wasn't in this unfortunate geopolitcal context.

stefantalpalaru 12y ago
See no evil, hear no evil?

jordanpg 12y ago

It is surreal reading this. The geographic connections between ccTLDs and their associated 2-letter pairs with their English connotations are completely arbitrary. ICANN could have just as easily decided to issue all 26*26 two-letter TLDs according to some other scheme.

geographomics 12y ago
It's not completely arbitrary, it's mostly based on ISO 3166 which is in turn derived from the names of countries. So on the contrary, it was a very deliberate assignment of two letter codes to territories. If the islanders had not been forcibly displaced in the 1960s, they would most probably have been had some say in the governance of .io, as other British overseas territories have done for their respective domains.
- rustyfe 12y ago
  That isn't what he said was arbitrary though. The argument was that the pairing is arbitrary. So there's a justifiable reason why this island would have the .io TLD, but no justifiable reason why that is also an acronym for Input/Output. There's no particular reason .tv is Tuvalu and also Television. It just worked out that way and some acronyms are more valuable than others.
- dingaling 12y ago
  > it's mostly based on ISO 3166 which is in turn derived from the names of countries. The mostly is significant; in several cases the ISO was over-ridden and arbitrary but sensible codes assigned e.g. UK instead of GB. Many smaller territories were not granted codes in ISO3166 and had to be 'invented' for the TLDs ISO3166 is in itself a bit of a mess, and since it became used for TLDs there have been dozens of requests for changes and additions based on new TLD assignments.
  - M2Ys4U 12y ago
    .uk was the first ccTLD, and the assignment precedes the decision to use ISO-3166

majc2 12y ago

John Pilger's "Stealing a Nation" documentary goes into the Chagos Islands in quite a lot of detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zhGvId4fcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zhGvId4fcc

kiliancs 12y ago
Thanks! I also recommend it.

notastartup 12y ago

I picked up http://getleads.io http://getleads.io for only $40, it was ridiculously easier than I thought because somehow I remembered .io domains as being expensive. Seems like the competition has brought down the prices quite a bit in the past few years.

ceejayoz 12y ago
$40 is expensive for a domain.
- bbcbasic 12y ago
  yes .bit is much cheaper!

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

kijin 12y ago

Okay, this is going to be controversial, but I have no problem whatsoever with moving people around like this, as long as: 1) the displaced people are adequately compensated for their loss, and 2) they are given freedom to move to a place where they can enjoy human rights and make an adequate living. The right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates is not a human right. This applies at every scale from a single building demolished to make way for a highway, to an entire country's worth of refugees. So the big problem is not that Britain evicted the Chagossians and is refusing to let them back. That was just a case of eminent domain. The problem is that Britain and Mauritius never properly compensated them and didn't ensure that they could make a living in their new home. If redistributing the profits from .io to these people would make goddess of justice smile, fine, let's do it. But enough with the "it's my ancestral home!" bullshit. As the article mentions, the Chagossians weren't even the "native" or "original" population of the islands. The French had enslaved them and brought them there by force, and the rest were migrant workers from India. None of them had any right to claim those islands as their home, except that they happened to live there at the time when Britain decided to vacate the islands. In fact, none of us have any right to claim any piece of real estate as our own. The law, of course, grants certain people certain rights with respect to land, for the sake of convenience and economic efficiency. But morally, it's all arbitrary. Why does it matter whether someone has lived on a piece of land for three generations or three hundred? What about nomadic peoples who claim a large swath of land but only use parts of it sporadically? Besides, virtually all habitable land on Earth has been conquered multiple times by different groups of people, all of whom might have some sort of claim on that land. Whenever we hear about some group of people who complain that their house, village, country, etc. was taken from them, the location in question rarely has anything more than sentimental value for the oldest members of that group. What really matters are human rights (e.g. right to participate in the governance of whatever territory they happen to live in) and the ability to make a stable living. Without those, returning the land to them won't make their circumstances any better. Nostalgia doesn't put food on your table. On the other hand, once you have rights and a stable occupation, over time you learn to stop fussing about your location. The idea that some people have some sort of god-given right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates has caused so much bloodshed, unnecessary grief, and opportunity for ideologues to take advantage of innocent people throughout human history. Can't we just stop doing that already?

russellbeattie 12y ago

Sooo... what? This is easily the third or fourth time this has been linked to in Hacker News. What relevance does it have to anything? Everyone who uses .io domains are horrible, insensitive people? Those who use .me domains should be forever ashamed of the various human rights violations of the Montenegrin government in 1995? Anyone who uses bit.ly is basically insulting the victims of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing? Etc. etc. It's just stupidity, and given the vast numbers of gTLDs which are coming online every day, completely forgotten about relatively shortly.

hoprocker 12y ago
Another thing I've wondered about with suffix-hopping is the guarantee of stability there is -- in example, using the Libyan domain .ly in light of the recent radical changes. (An associated meta-question being, of course, if this is really the most important thing to worry about in relationship to Libya.) edit Whoops, I meant Libya.
- disordr 12y ago
  This is what I have wondered for a long time.
tarminian 12y ago
First time I've seen it. I think it has a lot of relevance, we all need to think more about the things we purchase. That chocolate bar you just ate was probably produced using slave labor, those new cool shoes, made with sweat shop labor by young girls. To just brush off articles like this is insensitive.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  If everyone's guilty, it means nobody is. If everyone has something they did, didn't do, or didn't stop which implicates them in being a horrible human being, all it becomes is an endless cycle of "well, you did that" "oh, and you didn't do that" which completely distracts from any honest effort to fix the underlying problems.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

mrfrisby 12y ago

This thread is a depressingly self-serving reflection of this community. Few of you seem to have bothered to do anything but skim the article and come to a snap judgement based on what seems to be your idealised notion of how TLDs should be managed. For the sake of my own sanity, lets just be clear here: 1. An island chain was forcibly depopulated in order for the largest land mass to be leased to the United States as a strategically important military base away from outside observers which has since been used as a staging post for the renditions of people to illegal prisons on US sovereign territory. 2. The former inhabitants of the Island are prevented from returning thanks to a tricky piece of political gamesmanship which classfieid the island chain as a marine park unable to sustain human population, whilst at the same time permitting the construction and continuous growth of one of the United States largest overseas military bases. 3. The Chagossians - now living in slums in Mauritius - or even worse - Kent, have limited access to education, die younger than they ought to, and are prevented from prospering in exile thanks to their ill treatment at the hands of the Mauritian government, the same government paid to help Britain pave the way for the above heinous acts. 4. The natural resources of the islands, the land, the sea, the soil, the strategically important geographic position, the TLD, the international dialling code, the airspace - all of this was stolen when the people were forcibly removed. You may discuss the merits of TLD sovereignty somewhere else, this is not the issue at hand here. If Britain can sell and profit from .uk domain names, the Chagossians deserve that same right as equals. This is not about a TLD, it is about the abhorrent treatment of a small nation at the hands of a large one. It is the grossest example of the same kind of tawdry crap which colonial powers of past and present have gotten away with for centuries. Your ignorance and self-serving positions are staggering, disappointing, and completely unsurprising.

frozenport 12y ago
I don't find it pragmatic to revise history, I don't believe the Native Americans should get .us
- chrislgrigg 12y ago
  This situation doesn't really seem like it's "history" in the same sense, considering it happened so recently, governments are still actively working against them as they attempt repatriation, and the TLD issue is fresh.

chrislgrigg 12y ago

If nothing else, it would be nice if learning about this inspired those who own .io domains to contribute to a fund for the Chagossian people. I'd certainly match the $60 I paid to register my domain to a support organization if I could find one that looked legit.

iLoch 12y ago

Perhaps a good starting point would be allowing me to sign a petition when I order a .io domain. Obviously this would require action by large domain providers, but it would be a good way to raise awareness I think.

kiliancs 12y ago

It's very sad to see more examples of nations with power taking advantage of smaller nations, but I'm aware there are more cases than we'll probably be able to find out about. To me cases such as this one should be resolved based on universal principles that are sadly ignored, such as that all nations should treat each other as equal and see themselves as parts of a greater community whose best interest should be always a priority. Justice can only be made if it's based on solid principles.

donmb 12y ago

I don't own a .io domain although thought about it several times. At least now I know I will not buy one. Thanks HN.

jahewson 12y ago

There's an obvious flaw in this argument. The .io domain is a British invention, it only exists because of the decision to separate the islands from Mauritius. Had the US not wanted a military base, then the Chagos Islands would be part of Mauritius and have a .mu domain. Had history unfolded as the OP wanted then .io would simply not exist. Alternatively, if the islands were to become independent in the future then they would no longer be the British Indian Ocean Territory, by definition, and likewise have no logical claim on (or even need for) the .io domain. It's easy to feel sorry for these people, but it's hard to see how they have a claim on something which was never theirs and is an administrative construct of a territory which they never lived in, which would ultimately be abolished in some future ideal world. Given the article's many complaints about the U.S. military and the CIA, I can't help thinking that the OP might have a more compelling case for boycotting .com domains.