.io questions in sharp focus as UK signs Chagos treaty

The UK government has signed a treaty handing over sovereignty of the Chagos archipelago to Mauritius, which could eventually turn out to be bad news for .io domain name owners.

Currently known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, Chagos was seized in the 1960s and 1970s, its citizens deported, and is home to a strategically important UK-US military base.

The new treaty (pdf) is not of course interested in issues as small-beer as ownership of ccTLDs — it’s much more concerned with the control of spectrum critical to running the base — but there are some elements of the text that may be cause for concern.

• A name change now seems inevitable. With Mauritius now assuming full sovereignty of the whole archipelago, the name BIOT seems destined for the trash heap of history. The treaty does not refer to BIOT once.
• The treaty does explicitly grant Mauritius control over “regulation of commercial activities, including the provision of electronic communications services, unrelated to the operation of the Base”.
• The UK is to inform the United Nations that it no longer exercises sovereignty over Chagos and Mauritius will also gain full representation for Chagos at the International Telecommunications Union.

Who gets to talk to the UN on behalf of the islands is important because of how country names and the codes used for ccTLDs are assigned.

The Statistics Division of the United Nations Secretariat publishes a standard known as M49, “Standard Country or Area Codes for Statistical Use”. That’s where ccTLD codes first appear.

That list is used by the International Organization for Standardization when it builds its ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 list, which is in turn used by ICANN/IANA to decide which territories qualify for a ccTLD and what the ccTLD is.

If Chagos is no longer recognised by the UN as a separate territory for statistical purposes, that would set a chain of events in motion that would see .io removed from the DNS root in five to 10 years.

If Chagos retains its place on the various lists, and Mauritius changes not only the name but the two-letter code, that would see .io retired and replaced with the ccTLD matching the new code, again in five to 10 years.

Or Mauritius could change the name, but not the code, meaning .io registrants would be safe. The ccTLD is believed to have over a million registrations and is popular with tech companies as a domain hack for I/O or input/output.

Identity Digital runs .io via a UK-based shell company it acquired several years ago. Perhaps sensing which way the wind was blowing, the company recently made a deal to become the back-end registry operator for .mu, the Mauritian ccTLD, so it has a foot in the door in the country.

.ai sees $600,000 auction sales in a month

.ai saw over $600,000 in expired domain auction sales last month, according to new registry operator Identity Digital.

The company took over management of Anguilla’s ccTLD February 25 and it announced the auctions revenue number in a March 27 blog post.

The previous registry held monthly auctions using Dynadot, but Identity Digital switched to Namecheap and went daily.

It’s also put .ai into its DropZone system, so domains that don’t sell at auction can be bid on by registrars through a centralized registry-managed process rather than dropping immediately,

Identity Digital also said that its regular registration revenue has increased 60% compared to last year.

Is .io safe now? Identity Digital now running Mauritian ccTLD

Identity Digital appears to have taken over the back-end registry for Mauritian ccTLD .mu, potentially improving the company’s chances of future-proofing at-risk .io.

IANA records show that .mu has started using Identity Digital’s nameservers and Whois service. Registrars say the migration to ID’s EPP system happened last week.

Mauritius is poised to be given sovereignty of the Chagos archipelago, formally known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, from the UK, assuming the still-unpublished treaty is approved by both governments.

BIOT is assigned the popular .io ccTLD which may have more than a million registrations and makes Identity Digital, which acquired the UK-based registry operator a few years ago, about $40 million a year.

The change of control of Chagos, which would certainly come with a name change for the territory, puts the future of .io at risk, as I have been reporting for the last several months.

But with Identity Digital now in bed with the .mu ccTLD manager — a private company named Internet Direct that also goes by MU-NIC — it has a foot in the door for improving relations with the country, should .io come under threat in future.

I believe MU-NIC was previously using CoCCA’s software to manage .mu.

(Hat tip: DI reader “Tom”)

.ai channel doubles under new management

.ai has twice as many registrars selling it since Identity Digital took over management of the registry in January, according to the company.

The company said over the weekend that its channel has doubled since it announced its partnership with the Government of Anguilla. That seems to mean it now has about 80 registrars, based on an archived list published by the old registry.

That’s a tiny chunk of the hundreds of registrars that already plug in to Identity Digital’s other TLDs — .org has about 2,150 registrars and .live has over 1,600, for examples — meaning there’s a lot more room for growth.

Identity Digital also said that .ai saw a 46% year-over-year increase in the number of new domain creates in January. A graph it published shows creates around 23,000 to 24,000 in the month.

We can’t work out what .ai’s domains under management is, because we don’t know what the renewal rate was or how many domains were deleted, but the previous administrator had said there was just shy of 600,000 names at the end of 2024.

It’s also emerged that Identity Digital might have inked a pretty sweet deal with Anguilla. According to a recent video from former manager Vince Cate, the company is taking 10% of the revenues from .ai’s sales

While that might not be a huge slice of the pie, it’s a pretty big pie — bog standard .ai names sell for $70 a year and auctioned expired names regularly sell for thousands.

A $7 per-domain payment is very high for a back-end registry services deal, where providers are believed to usually get a buck or two, but it seems Identity Digital might be providing more than just a dumb platform to .ai.

Trump inclined to back deal that threatens .io

US president Donald Trump has indicated he is likely to back a UK-Mauritius treaty that puts the long-term future of .io domains into question.

Speaking to the media yesterday before a meeting with UK prime minister Keir Starmer, Trump said he was “inclined” to support the deal, which would see sovereignty of the Chagos Islands transferred to Mauritius.

Chagos, officially the British Indian Ocean Territory, has the popular .io ccTLD, which is managed by a UK shell company belonging to Identity Digital.

The change of control would likely lead to a change of name, which could eventually lead to .io being retired, as I have previously written.

Trump’s opinion on the deal was seen as critical, as Chagos’ largest island, Diego Garcia, is currently home to a strategically important UK-US military base. The proposed treaty would see the UK lease Diego Garcia from Mauritius for at least 99 years.

UK ministers have recently indicated that the US had an effective veto on the treaty, but Trump said yesterday: “They’re talking about a very long-term, powerful lease, a very strong lease, about 140 years actually. That’s a long time, and I think we’ll be inclined to go along with your country.”

While it’s not a definite yes, it perhaps shows the direction of travel, and it’s not great news for .io registrants. Any retirement of .io would take five to 10 years from the point the process starts, so there’s no need to panic just yet.

Identity Digital offers free domain trials through LinkedIn

Identity Digital says it is to offer its services via a partnership with LinkedIn.

The company said in a press release it will offer a three-month trial of the web site bundle offered by registrar subsidiary Name.com, to people who sign up for LinkedIn Premium, as one of the service’s “perks”.

The trial, which includes domain, hosting, and email, renews at $99 for the first year before reverting to the regular $289 annual price, the company said.

Other trial perks offered by LinkedIn Premium include a mindfulness app and Audible, which provides audiobooks and podcasts.

Another 40,000 .ai domains registered

Anguilla’s .ai grew by almost 40,000 domains in the last two months, according to the registry, as the ccTLD continues to benefit from the growth of the artificial intelligence industry.

Total registered domains was 572,575 domains on November 27, according to the registry web site. That’s up 39,507 from the 533,068 it reported on October 1. On December 20, 2023 the total was 353,928 domains.

.ai is in the process of a migration, which will see Identity Digital take over the functions of the registry. The TLD’s IANA record was recently updated to replace as technical contact the long-time manager Vince Cate with the Government of Anguilla.

Unlike other rapidly growing TLDs, which tend to sell cheap and rapidly fill up with junk, .ai still commands a mid-range price of $70 a year with a two-year minimum.

Namecheap scores win in .org price-cap lawsuit

Namecheap’s lawsuit over ICANN’s decision to lift price caps in .org and .info will be allowed to proceed, a California judge has ruled.

The Superior Court in Los Angeles recently threw out ICANN’s attempt to get the case dismissed, according to court documents released by ICANN. There will now be a hearing in January.

Namecheap’s lawsuit concerns ICANN’s decision in 2019 to lift price caps in Public Interest Registry’s .org contract and the .info contract then with Afilias (now Identity Digital).

Both registries had previously been limited to a 10% price increase every year.

The registrar filed an Independent Review Process case against ICANN, which is mostly won. In 2022, the IRP panel slammed ICANN for its secrecy and lack of adherence to its bylaws and issued seven recommended actions the Org could take to rectify its transgressions.

In the current lawsuit, filed this January, Namecheap claims that ICANN “largely ignored” most of these recommendations. It wants the court to force the Org to abide by the IRP ruling, which among other things calls for ICANN to look into reinstituting price caps.

But ICANN objected, saying Namecheap “is asking this Court to convert recommendations into requirements”, adding that it “does not have an obligation to act in accordance with the ‘recommendations’ of an IRP Panel”.

It demurred, asking the court to throw out Namecheap’s complaint, but the court declined to do so on legal grounds, meaning the claims will be heard on the merits.

In the five years since the .org and .info price caps were lifted, non-profit PIR has not raised .org prices once.

For-profit Identity Digital has raised .info prices every year, by between 9.38% and 11.03%, raising the cost from $10.84 in 2019 to $17.50 today. The price will go up again by 8.57% to $19.00 in January.

Identity Digital to take over .ai

Identity Digital is to take over the running of .ai, following a deal with the Government of Anguilla announced today.

The two parties said they “plan to build a world-class registry management program that prioritizes quality domains and instills trust in .AI domain names for years to come”.

It looks like a back-end deal. There’s no suggestion of any kind of redelegation.

Currently, .ai is run by a small local outfit called DataHaven.Net, on a fairly basic web site that gives off all the vibes of being a one-man show and perhaps a little bit slapdash.

Identity Digital, by contrast, runs its huge portfolio of TLDs on the Amazon cloud and has pretty much blanket coverage of ICANN-accredited registrars. Only 40 registrars are listed on the current .ai registry site.

The ccTLD has grown to be a significant player in the last two years, growing from about 150,000 domains mid-2022, prior to generative AI entering the popular imagination, to 533,068 at the start of this month.

Identity Digital said that .ai already accounts for 20% of Anguilla’s revenue, and that this new deal should help increase that amount.

Five times ICANN deleted a ccTLD, and what it means for .io

With the future of .io coming into question this week, with the news that the UK will return sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius, I thought it would be a good time to see how ICANN has treated disappearing countries and territories in the past.

As far as I can tell, ccTLDs have been removed from the DNS root on only five occasions since ICANN came into existence in 1998.

While the circumstances differ, in all but one case the trigger for the deletion was a change to the International Standards Organization’s ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 list, which ICANN uses to decide who gets a ccTLD and what ccTLD they get.

.yu — Yugoslavia

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia broke up in 1992 due to a bloody civil war, but it wasn’t until 2010 that ICANN finally removed .yu from the root.

Splinter nations Slovenia, Croatia, North Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina were all assigned their own new country codes — .si, .hr, .mk and .ba — in the 1990s, but the now independent and separate states of Serbia and Montenegro, initially known as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, carried on using .yu.

When the country renamed itself the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro in 2003, the ISO list was updated to assign it the new code .cs, but the corresponding ccTLD was never actually delegated before the country broke up again in 2006, getting the ccTLDs .rs and .me the following year.

RNIDS, the .rs registry, carried on running .yu for a few years while it transitioned registrants to the new ccTLD. The process was not entirely painless, and ICANN had to keep .yu live longer than planned, before eventually deleting it April 1, 2010.

.tp — Portuguese Timor

The country we now know as East Timor or Timor Leste started the 21st century as Portuguese Timor, under Indonesian occupation. Its ccTLD was .tp.

After the country gained its independence in 2002, it renamed itself Timor Leste and the ISO assigned it the new code TL, deleting TP from its list.

IANA delegated .tl to the local government in 2005 and encouraged .tp registrants to migrate, but it took a full decade before it followed through and removed .tp from the root, in February 2015.

.zr — Zaire

The first ccTLD to get deleted by IANA under ICANN’s watch was .zr, which was no longer needed after Zaire changed its name to Democratic Republic of the Congo, receiving the code CD from ISO, in 1997.

The pre-ICANN IANA delegated .cd to the newly named country in 1997 and the registry operator set about moving .zr names to .cd. By 2001, that process was completed and .zr was deleted from the root.

.an — Netherlands Antilles

The Netherlands Antilles was a collection of former Dutch colonies in the Caribbean, until the territory split, with its component islands receiving new statuses under Dutch law, in 2010. The ccTLD was .an.

Curaçao got .cw, Sint Maarten (Dutch part) got the sexy-sounding .sx, and Bonaire, Saint Eustatius and Saba got to share .bq. ISO removed AN from its list.

The transition was a bit more complicated than usual, as .an registrants had to transfer to a new ccTLD based on what island they were on, but the local authorities managed it and within five years .an went poof.

.um — United States Minor Outlying Islands

This one’s unique in that it was deleted apparently simply because the registry operator couldn’t be bothered with it any more.

The United States Minor Outlying Islands are pretty much unpopulated, but strategically well-located, islands belonging to the US. There’s eight in the Pacific and one in the Caribbean.

Its ccTLD was operated by the University of Southern California until 2006, when somebody at ICANN noticed it appeared to be broken. When it approached USC for an explanation, it was told “they were no longer interested in managing the .UM domain”.

It had no registered domains, so there was no need for a transition plan and IANA deleted it from the root the following year.

The islands and their code are still on the ISO list and are still eligible for their ccTLD. Presumably it’s only the fact that the US government has asserted its authority over .um that has prevented an opportunist Just Some Guy registry from snapping it up to market .um domains as the leading destination for indecisive people or something.

What does this mean for .io?

ICANN’s policy on ccTLDs is pretty straightforward — your territory has to be on the ISO 3166 list and the ccTLD has to match the code ISO gives you. If your code drops off the list, you have five years, extensible to 10, to conduct an orderly transition before the TLD is retired.

Much like Portuguese Timor changing its name to Timor Leste to shuck off its enforced colonial branding, it seems inconceivable that the Chagos Archipelago will continue to be known as the British Indian Ocean Territory.

The key questions for .io registrants are: will the renamed BIOT keep the IO assignment on the ISO list, and will the archipelago continue to qualify as a distinct territory eligible for ccTLD status?

If BIOT simply becomes part of Mauritius, no longer recognized by the UN as a distinct territory, .io gains an existential threat. It would drop off ISO’s list and ICANN could issue it a retirement notice.

If BIOT remains a distinct territory and remains eligible for a ccTLD, the possibilities become a whole lot more interesting.

If Mauritius decides to change the territory’s name, there’s no problem. But if it asks ISO for a corresponding change of two-letter code to better reflect its new name, .io’s future is in doubt.

If the name is changed to something like “Chagos” and Mauritius wants a “C” code, only CB, CE and CJ are still available.

Theoretically, the government of Mauritius could unilaterally force an undesirable string change on Identity Digital, the American company that runs the .io registry, forcing a years-long migration to the newly chosen ccTLD.

I can’t imagine many of .io’s hundreds of thousands of registrants, particularly those using .io as a domain hack or to hitch themselves to a cool tech-startup bandwagon, being happy with a forced migration to, say, .cj.

The power to decoolify an entire TLD would be a compelling weapon in a redelegation fight. I’m deep into speculative territory here, but I can’t help but feel that Identity Digital is going to have to give Mauritius some money at some point.

Another possibility is that the registry, one of ICANN’s biggest funders, could lobby ICANN to change its policies and somehow grandfather .io in as a stateless ccTLD.

The fact that ICANN hasn’t acted to remove .su from the root, thirty years after the Soviet Union collapsed, could be seen as precedent.

The answers to .io’s future might be found in the proposed UK-Mauritius treaty, but that has yet to be published. As it has to be ratified by the UK Parliament we can expect it to enter the public domain before long.