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.io questions in sharp focus as UK signs Chagos treaty

Kevin Murphy, May 22, 2025, Domain Policy

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.

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

Kevin Murphy, March 4, 2025, Domain Registries

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”)