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 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 .to ccTLD for the Kingdom of Tonga.
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 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.
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