.io domain termination is one of the fastest growing in recent years . Of the favorites by startups, developers and software companies for its analogy with I / O, the abbreviation used in computing for input / output. Now, in addition, many websites related to cryptocurrencies also use it. In total there are more than 700,000 .io domains registered in the world, and their contracting is also one of the most expensive. In Italy it is also especially popular because io means “I”.
But its link with technology is a pure construct. Like . Us, .es or .mx .io is a geographic top-level domain or ccTLD, which refers to a specific place or territory on the Earth's surface. Specifically, the British Indian Ocean Territory, a remote cluster of small islands and atolls scattered between Africa and India in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Geographically it is known as the Chagos Archipelago. It consists of seven atolls and more than 1,000 tiny islets and its largest island is Diego García.
As its name suggests, the British Indian Ocean Territory (we'll call it Chagos from now on) continues to belong to the British Overseas Territories and is therefore under the control of the United Kingdom as an inheritance of its Indian Empire.
But Chagos is a territory without its original people. Its inhabitants, the Chagossians , a town of about 3,000 people who arrived as slaves brought by the British to the islands, no longer live there. They were expelled. Now, they are immersed in a judicial process to claim not only to return to their islands, but also part of the money that several companies have obtained with the sale of the domains with their territorial termination.
This is the story that connects one of the cables of colonialism that is less talked about with a fashion and digital enrichment.
A town swept by a military base
Radar of the Diego García military base. Wikimedia Commons The story that takes us to what happens after the .io begins with a military base during the Cold War .
In 1962, the United States contacted the United Kingdom to reach an agreement on a part of the Chagos Islands. The archipelago, under British control since 1814, was strategically placed for American planes to refuel on their way to Southeast Asia. The British government accepted, and to clear the way to the US , expelled the native residents of the islands, a process that is one of the hidden pages of history. Many of the Chagos residents ended up in the Seychelles or Mauritius, where their descendants often still live among the poorer classes.
The United Kingdom denied independence to Chagos, the territory from which the termination of domain.io emanates, to install a military base
As a result of that agreement between powers, in 1965 Chagos got its current name : British Indian Ocean Territory. The still present military base was installed in Diego García. In 1967, when a good part of the overseas territories became independent, as was the case of Mauritius, but the United Kingdom retained Chagos due to its strategic profile.
This colonial heritage has continued to this day. In 2010, Chagos was declared a protected area. That was billed as “the largest marine reserve in the world” … But a Wikileaks cable published later revealed a British ministerial communication in which the marine reserve was said to be “the most effective long-term way to prevent any of the ancient inhabitants of the Chagos Islands or their descendants will be resettled. ”
teexpoliotudominio.io
Location of Diego García, the largest island of Chagos ( BIOT). Also marked with a dot the Seychelles. But at what point does all this connect with .io domains? To tell the story well, we must also go back to the days when the internet began to lay its foundations.
USC professor Jon Postel is the co-creator of the origin of the current internet domain infrastructure . After starting with the generics (.com, .net…) he decided that it would be a good idea for each country in the world or territory to have its own extension. By 1985, you had already assigned the top three: .us (for the United States), .uk (for the United Kingdom), and .il (for Israel). A decade later, almost every country in the world had it.
A British businessman managed .io domains for 20 years before selling his administration to another company
Managing these country-specific extensions required an administrator: someone to sell the domain names, provide technical support, and take a share of the profits as compensation. Postel did not think of granting administrative power over them to the governments of each territory , but began to give them to the first ones who requested it. Postel managed .us for years, and distributed the major countries mostly among colleagues from universities. Surely at that time there would be no one else interested or knowledgeable about it. It was the spirit of building the internet.
But that, logically, changed.
In 1994, when there were already more than 100 country-specific top-level domains, Postel updated its policy. Now the administrators of country-specific domain names had to have at least some connection with the countries in question, it was required to reach an agreement with competent authorities (although it was not specified that they were governments) and it was also required that at least one person involved in the entity that administers domain terminations lives in the corresponding country.
Chaguense worker photographed in 1971. Wikimedia Commons The system did not work in many cases, with many Western entrepreneurs managing to manage domain terminations from developing countries. Libya's .ly -now used for example by bit.ly- went to a British businessman who pretended to live in Tripoli. Over time there were other somewhat more suitable cases: . Tv, known for terminations for television networks and now booming thanks to Twitch , was ceded by the government of the also insular Tuvalu to a external company – Verisign, one of the largest in the sector – that pays him an average of $ 5 million annually. It doesn't seem like it is too much compared to the number of important domains it hosts, but something is something.
In the countries with more weight, the managing entities tended to be non-profit organizations dependent on the Government. In 2001, the US Department of Commerce convinced Postel's company to give it administrative privileges. In Spain it is Red.es, dependent on the Secretary of State for Telecommunications and for the Information Society (SETSI), the company that manages national domains.
That, of course, did not happen with Chagos and the .io.
The .io domain was delegated by the Internet Number Assignment Authority (IANA, which then acted as the global managing entity of domains as ICANN is now) to the British businessman Paul Kane in 1997 along with the ccTLDs .ac (Ascension Island), .sh (Saint Helena) and .tm (Turkmenistan). Kane operated them under his company, which became one of the largest domain managers in the early 2000s: the Internet Computer Bureau. In 2017, he sold his company with the ability to manage the .io to another provider named Afilias which, after a couple more acquisitions, is currently a subsidiary of a group called Ethos Capital .
The story is not over
Today the Chagossians are legally fighting to regain their territory, achieve their independence and obtain funds from .io domains.
According to a 2014 interview on the Gigaom blog with Paul Kane, he claimed to give part of his profits to the British Government, which in turn would refer them to the administration of the British Indian Ocean Territory. After being questioned as a result of the interview, the British Government denied having received funds from the sale of .io domain names, arguing that, consequently, the profits had never been shared with the Chagossians.
Currently, the Chagossians are legally fighting to regain their territory , achieve their independence and, incidentally, also to obtain funds from .io domains.
In this same year, the United Nations International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea ruled that the United Kingdom does not have sovereignty over the Chagos archipelago , and that sovereignty belongs to Mauritius. This would extinguish the British Indian Ocean Territory and perhaps the .io domain as well if the rule were extended. The UK contested the judgment and does not recognize the court's decision, so new legal proceedings are likely to be launched.
In July, a Chagos refugee association filed a lawsuit with the Irish government against domain name speculators Paul Kane and Afilias, a subsidiary of Ethos Capital, requesting the repatriation of the .io domain and the payment of back rights for an estimate of 7 million dollars per year generated by the domain.
