The British government is transferring sovereignty of an island in the Indian Ocean to Mauritius next week, potentially impacting the existence of the .io domain.
The British government is transferring sovereignty of an island in the Indian Ocean to Mauritius next week, potentially impacting the existence of the .io domain.
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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.
If IANA has all two letter domains reserved for countries, than why is there no .uk?
There is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk
There's no .uk and there never was!
looks at your instance domain
Carry on
i've seen a lot of .uk sites around
Unfortunately the IANA decided to kill the TLD altogether, but the Chagos islanders have been asking to get control of it themselves so they can receive the registration fees. This was sort of the worst of both worlds: they could have given the Chagos islands it's own TLD, or given control of .io to the Chagos islanders, but instead they just said, "you're not sovereign, so you get nothing".
edit: I'm reading elsewhere that it's not yet decided for sure whether to kill the TLD, but no one seems to think it will be given to the Chagossians, unfortunately.
I don’t get why they killed it. some regional areas have their own TLD. .cat for Catalonia, for example.
Two letters TLD like
.ioare ISO country codes. Catalonia's.catis a generic TLD in comparison. Since.iostands for the British Indian Ocean Territory and Chagos Island isn't going to be 'separate' anymore by becoming part of Mauritius, IANA's logic is that the ccTLD has to be retired. That.suis still around after the collapse of USSR isn't a valid argument for them.ok. I was not aware the two letter TLD were more restricted than the others. thanks!
Technically, they haven't yet. In the past they've sometimes transitioned ownership of country-code TLDs over (like the Soviet Union's .su to Russia). I think they just don't want to wade into the debate over the Chagos Islands in general.