Latest news of the domain name industry

Recent Posts

Future of .io domains uncertain as UK hands over Chagos islands

Kevin Murphy, October 3, 2024, 13:24:09 (UTC), Domain Registries

The future of the .io ccTLD is up in the air today with the announcement that the UK is to hand over the British Indian Ocean Territory, also known as the Chagos Archipelago, to Mauritius.

The two governments announced today that they will sign a treaty agreeing “that Mauritius is sovereign over the Chagos Archipelago”. It’s being called the end of British colonialism in Africa.

Under the broad-ranging 99-year deal, native Chagossians, forcibly exiled since the late 1960s, will be free to return to the islands, apart from Diego Garcia, which is home to a strategically important UK-US military base.

There’s no talk yet of the future the ccTLD, of course — the governments have bigger fish to fry — but the change of sovereignty could have interesting implications for the .io registry and its registrants.

The positive spin is that owning a .io domain could now be seen as a less dubious ethical choice.

For almost a decade, largely unsuccessful boycotts of .io have been organized by tech bros upset with the treatment of the Chagossians. Now that they’re getting their land back, the queasiness of supporting “digital colonialism” might go away.

The bad news is that a change of sovereignty could ultimately lead to a change of registry, or the ccTLD disappearing entirely.

ICANN takes its lead from the International Standards Organization, specifically the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 list, when it comes to deciding whether a ccTLD deserves to exist and what two-letter code it gets.

If BIOT ceases to exist and is removed from the ISO list, as seems likely, there’s a strong case to be made that .io should cease to exist too.

Whether ICANN would actually remove .io from the DNS root is another matter, of course. While it has removed ccTLDs before when the associated country disappears, it has done so in a measured, managed fashion.

The Org also seems quite happy for .su to stay in the root, thirty-odd years after the Soviet Union fell apart.

But what of redelegation? There’s already a campaign to get .io redelegated to the Chagossians, and now that the UK is relinquishing its control of BIOT to Mauritius, the redelegation claim could be strengthened by the weight of a national government.

However, while .io is assigned to BIOT, the UK government says it has no formal relationship with the registry, so a change of ownership of the territory doesn’t necessarily mean the ccTLD changes owners.

The registry is run by a private UK company, Internet Computer Bureau, which nowadays is basically a shell owned by an Irish company that is in turn owned by US-based Identity Digital and its parent Beignet.

And ICANN typically doesn’t redelegate ccTLDs without the consent of the losing registry, which in many cases is Just Some Guy who spotted a business opportunity in the 1990s.

Niue, the Pacific island nation, has been fighting fruitlessly for control of .nu for two decades, for example, but the extant registry doesn’t want to hand it over so ICANN has not acted.

As I reported earlier this week, .io had turnover of almost $40 million last year, so it seems unlikely that Identity Digital would follow the UK’s lead and just hand it over.

While the registry does not disclose its registration numbers, the revenue suggests it’s possible over a million .io domains have been registered.

If you find this post or this blog useful or interestjng, please support Domain Incite, the independent source of news, analysis and opinion for the domain name industry and ICANN community.

Tagged: , , , , ,

Comments (7)

  1. Braden Pollock says:
    October 3, 2024 at 1:38 pm

    Western Samoa also disappeared when they became just Samoa but .ws lives on.

    Reply
  2. Mark Thorpe says:
    October 3, 2024 at 1:58 pm

    Let the drama begin!
    Keep Calm and Buy .Com

    Reply
  3. Thomas Ment says:
    October 3, 2024 at 7:56 pm

    Many countries have separate country codes and tlds for separate areas, UK, US, France, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Denmark etc. so Mauritius having both mu and io wouldn’t be exceptional.

    Reply
    • David Conrad says:
      October 4, 2024 at 5:39 pm

      True, although if IO gets transferred to Mauritius, I’d imagine there might be some changes in how .IO is administered, which could impact the existing registrants. It becomes more ‘interesting’ if ISO-3166 moves IO to “transitionally reserved” as a first step to removing it from ISO-3166. I doubt that will happen.

      Reply

Add Your Comment