The dark side of .io

09 Jul 2014 • gigaom.com

Indeed, profits from the sale of each .io domain flow to the very force that expelled the Chagossian or Ilois people from their equatorial land just a generation or two ago: the British government.

… The British bought and shut down the plantations in the hope of getting the Chagossians to leave of their own accord, but many stayed, so the U.K. forced them all off the islands anyway, lying to the United Nations that they were just migrant workers.

I’m not sure how to help here though… is the lesson not to buy any .io domains - or to boycott .io domains and services? I don’t expect most people to boycott .io sites though - and I don’t think anyone outside of geekdom will even understand - since most people still add .com to everything. Or they search in Google and then click the link - without even knowing it’s .io.

The history is tragic but I think Seats.io CEO Ben Verbeken explains it best:

To us, the .io domain is not a geographical indication, but we took it because it refers to ‘input-output’. And our customers (mostly tech savvy people) understand it like so.

Some country TLDs have become so dissociated from the countries they belong to that it’s hard to even properly frame this type of injustice.

There is another remote possibility — Mauritius might win its sovereignty dispute with the U.K. over the Chagos Islands. If that happens, the ownership of .io rights would probably be up in the air.

If that happens I say give .io rights back to the Mauritius and lets call it a day. That’s if we are still pretending these TLDs belong to sovereign nations in the first place.