The web could soon say goodbye to a popular domain and used by several technology-related services and projects, and also exploited for disinformation, scam and phishing campaigns. We’re talking about .io domain which, although it is commonly associated with the abbreviation for input/output, is actually a domain created in 1997 and originally assigned to British Indian Ocean Territory.
This territory includes only the islands and atolls of the Chagos archipelago, under British control since 1814. Last week, however, the London government signed an agreement agreeing to give up ownership of the territory, marking both the end of the colonial era for the islands, but also threatening the survival of the .io domain.
To understand what happened, it is necessary to trace history back to 1814 when the Chagos and Mauritius islands, then under French rule, were ceded to the English. From there until 1965 the Chagos Islands remained a dependency of Mauritius: in that year, however, the English decided to grant sovereignty to Mauritius, but kept the Chagos because they were considered a strategic point on the world chessboard: one of the islands, Diego Garcia, it has been designated as the site of a US military base. Unfortunately, the affair was not without bloodshed, with the British army using force to evict Diego Garcia from the local population to make way for the US base.
It was at that time that the islands, formally the British Indian Ocean Territory, the country code IO was assigned. We then arrive in 1997 when the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) granted the management of the .io domain to the British entrepreneur Paul Kane, exercised through the entity Internet Computer Bureau, until 2017.
In 2021 the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea ruled that the UK cannot have any sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelagowhich instead belong to Mauritius. The court ruling effectively represents the end of the existence of the IO country code and consequently also the withdrawal of the .io domain once the reorganization of sovereignty becomes effective.
So we arrive to the agreement reached between London and Mauritius last weekaccording to which
the Chagos Islands will become part of Mauritius: an official treaty is still needed, but the path points in that direction, even if the population of Chagos accuses of having been excluded from the negotiations between the two countries.
IANA provides a procedure for which the disposal of domains corresponding to country codes that no longer exist must take place within 5 years. At the moment, however, it is premature to predict the fate of the .io domain since IANA has granted extensions and exceptions to the procedure: the .yu domainassigned to the then Yugoslavia, was withdrawn more gradually while the country’s government websites gradually moved to new domains. The Solomon Islands, also previously under British sovereignty, continues to retain the .sb domain. Il .gb domain (Great Britain) is inactive, but still assigned to the United Kingdom.
At the moment, however, there are different technological realities (Kubernetes.io,
ArtList.io, Futurepedia.io, Shodan.io, Itch.iojust to name a few) who have made .io their digital “home” on the web: it cannot be ruled out that to protect their interests these companies will try to plead their case to IANA to try to convince it to keep the domain active .
Source: www.hwupgrade.it
