I think people should be nervous about the fact that the Anguilla government randomly decided to hand over management of the domain to Identity Digital, when the people running it before had been running it for 30 years without any issue. They were also giving the government 95% of the profit just so that they WOULDN'T be replaced by a random company, and despite repeated offers by them to train the government on how to run it just so that they could keep it in house, they've still gone ahead and signed a contract with ID. Expect to hear about legal beef between the Anguilla government and ID in a few years when they refuse to give the domain back after their contract ends (the CEO has stolen TLDs before).
@@kacperfilipek8461 keep in mind that was in the 90s so things were a bit different back then. Think of it like this. Instead of hacking into a website and taking control over it, the mad lads broke into the place that hosted the website itself and stole the physical server the website was on. But in this case they stole a TLD instead
Fun fact : A couple days ago I was watching a seemingly unrelated video about how the sun would finally set on the British empire because of some random island being not British anymore (yes, I'm a geography nerd). At first I didn't realise the implications with .io, but as soon as you mentioned British Indian ocean territory I realised "oh wait..."
@@pruthweeshasalian3688 It's quite easy. You can just define a "random" island as one that the majority of the public would not be directly aware of the existance of. Plenty of people know about io domains, but not many outside of the tech sphere know it is a cctld, and even those who do likely didn't know which territory it belonged to.
Don't forget, that citizens of great britain lost their rights to their EU domains few years after leaving EU. You can loose your domain even when TLD remains.
The gigabrain strat here is for Mauritius to keep the island still independent enough so the IANA keeps the domain going while they can get some of that sweeet moola.
That, or the deal could be slightly modified that one square meter (or maybe the military base) still remains part of the territory, making the Indian Ocean territories still something that exists.
It's not an island, it's an archipelago. And it's far enough array from the rest of Mauritius that it would be reasonable to keep it as a separate jurisdiction.
I think you are right. Now the Indian Ocean Territories is administered by the UK, with them receiving the registration money. Maybe the UK uses that money to finance its administration of those islands, but even so that would just be money it doesn't have to take out of the UK budget. It would be a financial benefit to Mauritius to take over the administration of the IO domain as well as of the islands themselves.
For real! Just name that region the *Mauritius Indian Ocean Territory* and keep the massive revenue from it! (If Britain can call it that, so can Mauritius)
Sweden owns the TLD for Niue (nu), basically by purchasing it from the island which only has a population of 1 500 or so. This is because nu means ”now” in Swedish so it became a very popular domain for e commerce. My guess is that something similar can happen with io, UK can take over by simply purchasing the TLD.
The difference there is the country that bought the domain from continues to exist, so there is still a country to provide the right to use the domain.
Sweden didn't buy the domain, they bought the rights to it; if Niue ceased to exist, the domain would as well and it would still be impossible to distribute.
There is also .md domain which is owned by 🇲🇩 Republic of Moldova, but it's extensively used by doctors and clinics around the western world because MD also stands for Medical Doctor/Doctor of Medicine 🙃 While very unlikely, there is a small chance that in the future, Moldova and Romania might unite back, so the drama might start again around .md domain.
@@theairaccumulator7144 .su exists because of grandfather rights. Russia was supposed to shut it down, but they never got around to doing it. That won't happen now, because the rules won't allow it. IANA *might* allow someone to take it over, because if it gets entirely retired it could be resurrected if another country ends up with the ISO 3166 alpha-2 code IO, which would pose a security risk if someone registered currently existing names at that new future TLD registry.
That's just it, we could be using protocols that dynamically found other hosts etc but the powers that be would rather that there were central points to be able to destroy and do not favor decentralized networks (Even although the internet technically is a decentralized network, see netsplit). Its all about standardization really and "freedom" of information, like you can't just get a domain name without paying someone for it....
As someone who literally works on a .io domain (and a shareholder in the company) - so I'm obviously fairly biased - you might be surprised that I'm personally for the strict enforcement of these rules. The decision maker behind us choosing to use .io probably had no idea it was a ccTLD (Neither did I until I read this article earlier; good to know all 2-letter TLDs are ccTLDs). There are few things I enjoy less than inconsistent rulings, and if ICANN can somehow stick to their own rules here, and overpower a multitide of multi-million/billion dollar companies (of which mine is far from one of them) I can respect them a lot more.
Might not need to. If the UK can have BIOT as an independent state, then so can Mauritius (eg as another commenter suggested, MIOT). Transfer is just a transfer. Since BIOT is effectively zero population this is a minimally disruptive solution that strongly benefits Mauritius and quo. I would not be surprised if this happens. There are many possible solutions and this one is the most satisfying for all involved.
@@arcturuslight_ that I agree with, but that's a different angle entirely. If the result of this is "no more ccTLDs" ( which would certainly never happen) then that'd be even better
I remember one of the hosts of the Syntax podcast mentioned that he used to have a website with a .af domain. But once the Taliban took over Afghanistan, they seized the domain name and barred him from using it. Just goes to show how fragile the ownership of ccTLDs can be
Yeah.. ccTLDs are subject to whatever happens politically in a country as well as geopolitics, they are fragile. I do use a number of domains in the ccTLD of the country of which I am a citizen, but for anything serious I use generic/global TLDs. Fancy ccTLDs are certainly usefull for marketing purposes, and nothing wrong with using them for that, but never rely on them outside maybe the one of your home country provided it is stable and bound to exist for as long as you need it...
I don’t know as soon as heard Google and Microsoft will be affected I was not that worried. If they want to keep it around I am sure they will find the right people to pay off.
yeah or they just tell them no make us switch and just host the servers them selves for it. this country shouldnt be allowed to disrupt this if so many places depend on it. or countries shouldnt be allowed to have these in the first place.
@@GCAbleism158 i think that's likely, perhaps britain will keep it. that must have been part of the deal when they agreed on the land, i haven't heard about it
That's so cute, you think it's a top level domain even though 90+ percent of internet users will probably never visit an IO website unless they are causal gaming. Too funny. We all know that if all IO websites disappeared overnight, most people on the internet wouldn't notice.
.dd was also a domain that seized to exist. It was the TLD of East Germany but was dropped after the reunification. From what I could find it was never really used though, just assigned.
Tbf this was the early late 80's to 90'si would even be active for before the unification and at a time where having the internet was considered a luxury/nerd hobby
Chagos (officially British Indian Ocean Territory) had no permanent population, all the existing people having been carried off by the British (I guess this is technically ethnic cleansing). So .io was a country code without any people. Pretty risky. The people of Chagos didn't get their land back by the way, it went to Mauritius, who had a decent legal claim over it. Chagosians aren't really happy about this outcome.
Which is why this .io case is more or less similar to the cases described earlier in the article. Just because the UK is handing it over occupied land does not necessarily mean they are handing it over to the right party or that the descendants of the indigenous people are going to acquiesce.
@@thevivariumforhalfmeasures7698 why this is different is that the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were bang-to-rights real countries, with real people in them, and seats at the UN and everything. BIOT was a territory of another state, with no people, no sovereignty, and no recognition. It was always a big long term risk when it came to TLDs.
@@thevivariumforhalfmeasures7698 there are only about 50 expected to return, so there's not really a choice no matter how annoyed they are, because you can't really have a functional self-governing state made up of 50 people (most of whom are going to be pensioners). It's crap for them, but it's just not practical in any way, realistically, the UK/US divesting means it has to be Mauritius taking over
I think this is a good reminder that the digital world is not a separate world. It’s all the same world. We have 1. It’s not some kind of transcendant departure from the material realm with its own endlessly stable laws and systems, it’s a bunch of wires and and committees lol
why does everything have to blow up on the internet at one point or another? It's enough to deal with JS alone, now we have to keep an eye out for .io domains as well? Sigh.....
@@AzarilhProblem: a lot of state codes would overlap with existing ccTLDs. Arizona (AZ) over Azerbaijan, California (CA) over Canada, Nebraska (NE) over Niger…
As a Slovenian I find it hilarious we took the yu domain name. Btw yugoslavia broke up into 7 countries not just the 4 making the situation even more messy.
I think your skepticism is right. Unlike the examples used, where the TLD's would only ever be used as a ccTLD. TLD's like "fm", "gg", "io", "me", and "tv" have found heavy use outside the ccTLD space, and in the "io" case almost exclusively so. As such I think (hope) the the decision will ultimately be made to convert it to a gTLD, also creating an umbrella of protection for other TLD's that find their way into the common vernacular like "io".
The rules says it can't be done. And I think those rules were there for years, so it shouldn't come as a surprise for .io domain owners that this could happen
@@se6369 Rules are meant to evolve with the times and the rules have been broken before (as mentioned in the video) to deal with special situations. I think this will be viewed as one of those special unforeseen situations that may actually result in a rules change. There is value in them changing the rule, as it increases the value of any domain using one of these ccTLD's, and increases confidence in the system overall. Yank away a TLD from millions of sites globally, and you erode the confidence in the system overall. There is an economic impact here as well that the rules simply cannot ignore. There is a lot of money in "io" and a lot of big brands using it, and branded around it. The economic pressure here will be extreme. ICANN also puts themselves at risk by failing to adapt to the situation, their authority is only by convention, and as users of the internet we can point to an alternate source of authority for naming if we ultimately disagree (same way we got people in countries to bypass censorship walls in the past). If anyone remembers back in the early 2000's we had alternate TLD providers (new-dot-net comes to mind), before ICANN smartened up and expanded the gTLD's in 2010. One simply needed to point at a different set of root DNS servers, and you could resolve any of the new TLD's transparently along side of the currently "accepted" TLD's. This movement was slowly gaining traction until ICANN added to the gTLD's. Imagine for a moment if Google made such a change, and altered their root mirror to point at an alternate authority? This would open up the world to these altTLD's in an instant, as many rely on their public root DNS servers at 8-8-8-8 as a source of DNS authority. All it takes is the right people in the right places to make a change, and the rest of us will be blissfully unaware.
@@se6369 well it seems that YT ate my rather lengthy reply. Not going to retype it all, so here is the tldr of it. Rules are meant to evolve with the times and there is precedent for breaking the rules in certain situations as mentioned in the video. I think this is a unforeseen situation that may actually result in a rules change before yanking away a TLD form thousands of domains globally. The economic pressure here will be enormous, and the consequences for ICANN could be dire if they do not adapt. ICANN exists by convention only, and if the right people in the right places decided to go around them they could. Back in the early 2000's we had altTLD providers, and that movement was growing eroding ICANN's authority until ICANN smartened up and expanded the gTLD's in 2010. If ICANN does decide to ignore the economic impact, I can see this becoming the wild west again with DNS, and alternate authority providers coming back into play.
Why should countries have their TLDs seized just because a bunch of westerners want to use them? Those countries use these TLDs as a source of income. What you're suggesting is international theft for the benefit of western corporations.
This is why you shouldn't use a TLD that doesn't represent the purpose AND geographical location of your entity. Treating TLDs which are bound to geographical locations as vanity TLDs puts you at risk of exactly this, and when this happens YOU WHO CHOSE your domain and TLD names are the only one to blame for your mistake. The minute I learned how TLDs worked as a teen decades ago, I understood this.
@@scbtripwire but if a vanity TLD drives or increases business or adoption or engagement to your website or service, you should utilize that tool at least as much as your competitors are. But you shouldn't expect the landscape to remain static forever, build your tools to be robust against (nearly) all forms of change or advertise that they won't last forever.
@@asailijhijr You don't need to make the same mistake your competitors make. The flaw with this reasoning is that a domain name builds trust as people use it. When that disappears, people will look elsewhere and may find look-alike clone sites which distribute malware instead of landing on the service's true new location. Not all .io services will know about this change before they get a chance to register a new domain and warn their users. Yes the .io registrar might send site owners a notice, but not all will receive it or take it seriously.
Pretty much. Seems like people are just assuming they should be bailed out for bad decisions they made here (yes, using country TLDs for a tech company and exposing yourself to geopolitical tensions is a bad long-term decision).
@@BrotherCheng Exactly. I had tried to answer the other guy and my answer got removed. :/ I even ran into an example of this today, a game which is no longer being updated which relies on a .io. Even if the service gets moved the game is still dead and will no longer be playable due to no longer getting updated and relying on .io.
In Finnland theres a part called Åland. It has the .ax TLD. So if that island can do simmilar to Åland and be a sufficient autonom island in Maritius it may be saved :)
The situation is kinda dumber than that. Mauritius never owned that territory. Their claim is entirely invalid. Honestly, i really dislike how the article frames it as "it's finally being resolved!" No, it's always been "resolved". This is no different than if I pointed at your house/car and said "hey, I owned that, give it back", and it only gets "resolved" when you give up your property to me.
This is incorrect. The UK deliberately split off the islands from the colony of British Mauritius before it was granted independence in order to build a military base as requested by the Americans. This went against customary international law, British commitments to decolonization, and the UN Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.
How this got 42 likes is beyond me. The UK split off the Chagos Islands from Mauritius before giving its its independence. So actually yes, it is their territory and we never had a legitimate claim to it and your analogy is stupid
How is it incorrect use though? On the official website he showed it literally states: "Anyone, anywhere can register" There's also nothing in the sales terms and conditions which state you have to use it in a certain way.
@@philadams9254 it is incorrect because CC-TLDs are Country Code TLDs, if a country goes away, it goes away, if your website is not related to that country, it shouldn't be on a Country Code TLD. Marketing is irrelevant. Their terms are also irrelevent because they are governed by IANA and IANAs terms apply and exceed their terms.
Adding some details. People like to point out that .su is still around so .io could also be around. But the difference is that the country code SU is still around, it's reserved, not removed. But IO will be removed. There's an important difference here.
Another precent is hk. When the British handed back Hong Kong to China, hk continued, and the regional government there is ultimately responsible for it. Same with Macau (mo) when Portugal handed that back to China.
@@Terigena that's because a) SU is a code that is reserved indefinitely and b) the Russian government pleaded to keep it. Brits won't care about a random domain that isn't even controlled by the government, and they already has tons of domains (uk, ac, gg, je, im, vg, ky, sb, ms, pn, sh, tc, ai, bm, fk, gi, gs)
The problem here is that in most organizations i have worked in, the default is that the domains of that org are controlled by the PR units of these orgs. And not a lot of people know about internet governance, at least the PR units.
@@andresalibaIIRC it was sold to square space or something like that. I actually transferred my .dev domain to CloudFlare because square space was horrible.
As if people wouldn't just add a " dot cohm(because YT yaaay) " to the end of "IO". The solution to save IO games is hilariously simple, hence my cynicism about the silly hyperbole in this video.
You don't understand, not having a specific couple of characters at the end of a website is a complete travesty! It's the worst thing that's happened in my life since starbucks didn't bring back my favorite seasonal menu item!
Nothing about the specific history of Chagos, Mauritius, and the UK confirms to the traditional story of colonisation. Standard priors don't apply here.
The point is, that there may be a point in (future) history, where a country could be founded with a claim for the same ISO-code. Would be crazy, but not impossible.
Hi, as someone from Mauritius I understand that the main point of the video is the .io however the way it skimmed through the reason why and the licensing was a bit insensitive given how the British have treated people from there and their modern day descendants. I think it's great to always learn a bit more about the history before proceeding and purchasing domains.
An exception should *not* be made for the io domain Since all two character TLDs are country codes, there should be increased visibility into what those special TLDs are, but the consequences of using those domains is on the web master just like any other domain
I support this. There are rules in place, they make sense, they are quite clear (aka not ambigous) which means predictability. So we should strive for them to be respected, so they stay in place. Going against it will make things more ambiguous and, ultimately, complicated, which will not benefit us in the long run.
@@Winnetou17 why should normal people care about the arbitrary rules created when the internet was a completely different place? The times of "webmasters" are long gone. Strictly following silly rules about that 2 letters could only represent a country and country-related things benefits only people on a spectrum who like things nicely sorted and organized, reduces opportunities for business branding, and makes no difference to ordinary people
@@svuvich I said why... If normal people don't care, that means they won't care the other way around either. If we're honest, normal people don't care that much about domain names anyway. They're not typing them, and in many situations they're not seeing them either. Many people use their phones where apps rule. And apps don't show domain names. Yeah, it reduces branding opportunities. But it's not like it's terrible without it, like they have no way of expressing themselves. I'm not worried about businesses at all.
.io is not owned by the UK government, not sure how they assign ccTLDs by ICANN but they gave it to some random guy in the 90s who has sold it to another company since so doubt the UK gov will get involved since they make no money from it anyway. I think it will go and some private equity firm which owns it will take the loss.
under iCANN rules the control of ccTLDs belongs, _irrevocably_, to the sovereign government with jurisdiction over the territory associated with the ccTLD. the sovereign can delegate this control to anyone it wants, but the authority to alter or revoke this delegation always lies with that sovereign. thus, when the indian east ocean territory still existed as a legal entity, the UK was the government that had the (non-transferrable) authority to decide who controlled it. the problem with .io is that _this territory no longer exists_: it was extinguished when the UK agreed to recognize mauritius as the lawful sovereign with jurisdiction over that territory. since the territory no longer exists, its ISO CC will also be extinguished, and thus also the ccTLD the only way to alter this state of affairs is to change ICANN's rules, which would be nontrivial. ICANN is a very strange organization, a sort of hybrid of a domestic nonprofit corporation (ICANN is legally incorporated as a charitable entity in California) acting as a trade association and a non-governmental organization under the law of nations, although it does not have the sort of organizing treaty document or similar protocol that most NGOs do. i suspect that one of the reasons ICANN will move very softly on this issue is that ICANN prefers its present governance, which is largely controlled by corporate interests, to what they'd end up with if they were to transition to a true NGO, which would likely result in them becoming a United Nations member agency similar to ICAO or ITU. i also suspect that either the ITU or even the UPU would be glad to take over ICANN.
@@notacow69 I actually looked this up, seems the UK Gov have said they never had control or received any income from it. Back when it was registered you could email IANA, then only 2 people and if you could prove you had the skills they would let you manage it.
The real conversation that needs to take place is why two-character domains are country-owned when that is clearly not how the internet operates presently. There needs to be a reckoning between the real-world use and these rules.
It is clearly how virtually all 2 letter TLDs are used. .io, .ai etc are rather the exceptions. And beyond that, if we start changing the 'rules' because some people refused to actually look into what they are using because they thought it is fancy, that entire internet thing soon will stop working.
@@c128stuffwe could have more strict enforcement over how ccTLDs are used and revoke ccTLDs that are mis-used. Ultimately the owner of the TLD has to allow all these foreign businesses to use their TLD, knowing that they are not advertising themselves as an entity from the country that owns the TLD. We could revoke TLDs from countries that do this, and prevent them from using ownership of a TLD as a means of gathering some level of rent from companies that want to leverage the TLD for unintended purposes. I’m not saying that’s good policy necessarily, but it’s not like the companies who purchase these domains are the only ones “breaking the rules” here, the owner of the TLD bears some culpability.
@@notacow69 Tuvalu will literally not exist in a couple of years due to rising waters (At least the island. There's currently a plan to digitalize the country but who knows what happens next?)
Exactly this. There should also be some serious debate about how a single entity, the IANA, (existing with zero international oversight) is allowed this level of control over what is essentially a information backbone of our entire planet. Its high time we scrapped the exiting DNS model to be honest. Its far too vulnerable to coercion by powerful nation state actors (looking at the USA since almost all IANA offices are located there). A decentralized system would be far better suited to the fractured nature of our world.
Given the comment about how much money these TLDs can bring in to small countries, this could have a huge impact on them and people who invested in generic TLDs. If .io goes away, I’d imagine the price for country code domains will fall and the money will shift to holders of other TLDs.
Couldn’t Mauritius simply keep the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) as a separate territory under its sovereignty, similar to how Britain currently administers it? They could potentially rename it to MIOT or something similar. This seems like a straightforward solution.
yes, well said. Someone with money will likely make that call, and the money does talk. There is no good reason for Mauritius to decline, especially when BIOT has literally no population (meaning no actual time or effort investment, just a name change).
"Myrrh-rish-us". "Myrrh" as in the Myrrh and Frankincense they gave to Jesus. "Us" pronounced more like "ess", the same way as the "us" at the end of tetanus.
The next big one in danger is .tv. It’s the ccTLD for Tuvalu. Tuvalu, a small atoll nation in the South Pacific Ocean is literally sinking under the ocean due to global warming and is constancy losing land area. Australia has started to take its residents as they gradually get displaced. So in the coming years Tuvalu as a nation will cease to exist. Making .tv domains a risky proposition.
A generic tld can be restricted too ! Most of them are owned by private companies that can impose their conditions as long as it respects their original agreement with the ICANN. Most of them (if not all) are easily accessible tho, you just have to rent them as usual.
ccTLD, gTLD... My first thought is, why not have "legacy TLDs" (gTLD)? Once a ccTLD is set to disappear, ownership could transfer to either the new country, or ICANN. I'm sure there's lots of issues with such an approach, but just retiring an entire TLD is also not without problems
I guess it's obvious what will happen - they have to be seen legally decommissioning it, but they know the ubiquity of it in tech too. Nothing stops them using after the fact.
When Yugoslavia broke up in the 2000s, the Serbian government became in charge of transitioning websites to Serbian or Montenegran domains. Only websites that didn't transition were deleted when the ending was retired in 2010. I would be shocked if a similar things wasn't done for people with .io domains: sure their new domain isn't as cool, but the websites themselves still exist and I think that's important.
Yes the domain is just a link to the server. The server isn't stored on the domain. You can swap the domain and it's the same server. You can for example access UA-cam by a variety of top domains.
yeah honestly this is good, even if the short term consequences are going to suck. maybe we would all do well to put a little more into what tlds we choose
How about we just completely divorce the domain names from the concept of physical countries? 90% of the national TLDs are used for foreign companies anyway. The whole design was a massive scam from the start.
I don't have much sympathy for companies abusing a random country code to get a "fancy" domain name. It completely breaks the expectation that country codes refer to countries! And of course when a country somehow ceases to exist it doesn't make sense to maintain a domain name referring to that old country. Everyone will know what the new domain is, it's obviously the new country code that the company now serves, assuming everyone uses domain names as intended. It only becomes a problem when you abuse the country codes for a basically a pun with no actual connection to the country. (Hard to write comments about domain names without accidentally having the comment be deleted for containing a url)
Claiming that this is "abusing" a ccTLD is more than a tad bit hyperbolic. The internet is a much, much different place than it was when these domains were created in the first place, plus, the idea that somehow the companies/brands which are registering and utilizing the .io ccTLD are abusing the country code for a cool domain name is made even more ridiculous when you consider that the actual parties responsible for the maintenance of the TLD itself had sold off the rights/control over it a few decades ago, similar to how the government of Tuvalu did for the .tv ccTLD, to a private commercial registrar so as to allow them to facilitate registrations and earn income.
@@dieselbaby Okay, maybe "abuse" is too strong and implies too much malice; but using a country code for something completely unrelated to said country, i.e. for a pun or otherwise fancy domain name is definitely "misuse"/"using it incorrectly". The fact that the maintainers and registrars are making it easy to misuse the country code for such uses doesn't make it a "correct" use of the country codes. But of course these registrars who are deliberately selling a country code as a "generic" TLD despite knowing well it's not are even more to blame for the misuse than the buyers who have been misled by them, especially if it's a random civilian who's bought it. But I would expect a company to do a minimum of research on how domain names actually work before basing their entire branding on a domain name.
One thing that should not be ignored is the fact that a domain is an asset that makes money to the one that holds it. When territories secede or pass hands, there are usually negotiations of how to handle certain assets. If things are left unclear in those negotiation or a debate arises, there is a good chance IANA will just fall back on their rules rather than getting tied up in all of that (with possibly extending a grace period on how long existing domains can remain). What's more, glancing over Wikipedia, it seems that .io already has some controversy on how it has been handled
Maybe a new country could be created for the purpose of registering the io abbreviation with ISO and thus maintain continuity of .io with IANA. It would just have to be admitted to the United Nations with a 2/3rds vote.
I learned this in the early 2000s when i tried to register "teh" as a company in the Cook Islands. Nathan Barley got one, it's well plastic. Keep it livid, yeah.
We still use SU domain and did not discontinue it. As Russia is an official inheritor of the SU by repaying all of its debt, we are the rightful owner of the SU domain. Therefore, if the all islands of BIOT would be transferred to Mauritius with all the installations there, the Mauritius would gain rights to everything BIOT including the -io domain. It then would become its owner in addition to its own domain. This actually can spearhead the economy as Mauritius is exceptionally poor.
While the incorrect use of TLDs should be curbed, I feel like the IANA should have some coordination to have processes for phase-outs like with .io. If you have to phase out one because of this kind of issue (or people using a terrible one like .mp4), IANA should at least take back the TLD in and say to owners "you have up to 6 months to migrate your domain, or up to 1 year if your domain's license is longer, to swap out of your license"
The IANA could make an exception to their rules, and let .io become the only two letter gTLD. They'd probably want some sort of agreement with the ISO to avoid them reusing io as a country code though.
I always thought it was stupid for people to use country code domains for purposes other than what they were intended, which was to be specific to things about that country. People who used .io or such rather than a non-country-specific TLD only have themselves to blame.
State and Intl bodies don’t have the same flexibility that people or companies do. People working there may have the same idea you do, but can’t implement due to limitations of law or treaty. The only way to change something like this is with either new laws, or sufficient pressure from the right places to ignore the rule.
yes and they most likely will... the tld “su” still exists to this day, and there’s no Soviet Union. Registration of them is still allowed as well, so the author of this article did basically 0 research.
@@gabrielpi314 They could take it over and say no new registrations and let Verisign manage it (who already manages root zone along with, com, net, org... for ICANN). Basically just keep it spinning as is. The problem with su is they let Russia manage it while just getting a promise of no new registrations and that is it with no way to enforce that restriction. Finally, if we were going to go by ISO 3166 2 letter country codes but due to the fact it was being used before that standard was written, UK generally uses uk (with a special exception) and not gb (UK controls both, some uk government sites where under gb for a bit but it doesn't accept new registrations and has basically disappeared from use).
But if they do keep it running as a generic domain, what do they do if a new country that IS abbreviated "IO" forms? Just willy nilly transfer over the generic domain to them?
One thing that probably was a huge mistake was even having country codes at all. Countries are born live and die. They break up, they get annexed, and sometimes more powerful country is decide that they would prefer it if no one remembered a country ever existed and start pressuring ngos to refuse to acknowledge them. This has been an issue for Unicode and the flag emojis. For instance many Vietnamese Americans resent that the three stripe flag of South Vietnam is not the Vietnamese flag in Unicode and is not represented in Unicode at all. The same is true of many Southerners with a revisionist view of the Confederacy who demand a Confederate flag emoji. There are certain things that need to be able to last indefinitely. Link rot is a real problem and TLD's disaapearing contributes to it. If there were no country codes the politics of whether or not a country gets a code would be rendered moot.
I am working in the tech-field of medical applications. This is a typical occurrence in this field. Billions if not trillions of dollars are lost in the blink of an eye when you do not respect the regulations. Yes, more than whatever Apple is worth is lost in the blink of an eye. All hail the regulations (which are there for a good reason).
I think they'll give it a special designation controlled by themselves or Britain. The country that now has that land back under control isn't wanting the name at all. And with the importance of tech/web name integration with IO, they'll be swayed to see the pro's v con's here, it'll be better for the internet as a whole to keep IO active and in use specifically for tech web use.
The Old Guard (com, net, org, gov, edu, ...) are never going anywhere. When you pollute the namespace with every g.. d... word in the dictionary, it's inevitable some of them will eventually disappear. (and in my book, 150% of them are just spammer crap.) The ccTLD's (country code) were _supposed_ to be identities for those countries, not BS ways to spell words with a domain name. But ICANN allowed each country to set their own rules, and instantly the ccTLD's became a gold mine.
I would love to see io deleted, just for the hubris of the internet to be brought in check, for adopting a ccTLD for the "aesthetic", rather than it's intended use.
The internet is alot larger than it used to be, and a policy change here is 100% neccesary. The .io ownership needs to be given to either the UK or Mauritius, there is no other functional solution.
This is so stupid, the area will still be known as 'British Indian Ocean' or simply 'Indian Ocean' after the treaty is signed, so therefore the domain should stay, however it makes sense that it wont. It's 10000% extremely unlikely that the domain continues to exist, if the UK government managed it instead, it would probably cause controversy and the new government is avoiding that as much as possible, so it's much easier to let Mauritius sunset the domain themselves.
So easy to fix, start a new country named Input Output, that's it!
He covered that at the start. Only countries can be 2 letters. Companies/etc needs to be Min 3
@@JayAntoney they literally said "start a new country"
@@JayAntoney you failed the test to ever get a visa to visit Input Output
Get In And Out to fund it.
I'm in, anyone else?
All the AI startups nervously checking Anguilla status as British Overseas Territory.....
Or actually preparing to shift on a trigger. I mean, if not, then they did they have business being an Internet startup anyway?
😂😂😂
I think people should be nervous about the fact that the Anguilla government randomly decided to hand over management of the domain to Identity Digital, when the people running it before had been running it for 30 years without any issue. They were also giving the government 95% of the profit just so that they WOULDN'T be replaced by a random company, and despite repeated offers by them to train the government on how to run it just so that they could keep it in house, they've still gone ahead and signed a contract with ID. Expect to hear about legal beef between the Anguilla government and ID in a few years when they refuse to give the domain back after their contract ends (the CEO has stolen TLDs before).
Let’s be fair, it was probably a stupid idea for so many of us to use country-specific TLDs for business purposes.
This, right here.
.me owners:
@@brlin Look, I said “us” okay I know
@@AROAH .us is good, US people should use it instead for just using .govt :/
For the longest time those were the only options too! gTLDs are pretty new in terms of TLDs.
Maybe we could convince Iowa to secede
omfg
Wouldn't that be .ia
@@t3dotgg The abbreviation for Iowa is .ia tho
ayo
Sadly 1. the Federal Constitution prohibits secession and 2. _Iowa_ is abbreviated _IA._
Physically going to a place and stealing a TLD is actually crazy.
Yep!
That's the Balkans for ya XD
How would that even work? Is there some asymetric key signing required to register a domain or what?
@@kacperfilipek8461 keep in mind that was in the 90s so things were a bit different back then.
Think of it like this. Instead of hacking into a website and taking control over it, the mad lads broke into the place that hosted the website itself and stole the physical server the website was on. But in this case they stole a TLD instead
@@pa3ckp7I was so confused, and then I watched the video.
Classic Slovene thiefs.
Fun fact : A couple days ago I was watching a seemingly unrelated video about how the sun would finally set on the British empire because of some random island being not British anymore (yes, I'm a geography nerd). At first I didn't realise the implications with .io, but as soon as you mentioned British Indian ocean territory I realised "oh wait..."
what is a random island? How do you quantify and compare the randomness of islands?
@@pruthweeshasalian3688, it's one that Slartibartfart did the crinkly edges on for Earth Mk II after not being given Norway the second time around. 👍🥾
Toycat?
@@notsoma yup
@@pruthweeshasalian3688 It's quite easy. You can just define a "random" island as one that the majority of the public would not be directly aware of the existance of. Plenty of people know about io domains, but not many outside of the tech sphere know it is a cctld, and even those who do likely didn't know which territory it belonged to.
Don't forget, that citizens of great britain lost their rights to their EU domains few years after leaving EU. You can loose your domain even when TLD remains.
I tried registering a .EU before UK left the EU. Refused... 😢
The gigabrain strat here is for Mauritius to keep the island still independent enough so the IANA keeps the domain going while they can get some of that sweeet moola.
That, or the deal could be slightly modified that one square meter (or maybe the military base) still remains part of the territory, making the Indian Ocean territories still something that exists.
@@rikschaafOr they could make the British military bases in Cyprus (Akrotiri and Dhekelia) an own country with the country code IO.
It's not an island, it's an archipelago. And it's far enough array from the rest of Mauritius that it would be reasonable to keep it as a separate jurisdiction.
I think you are right. Now the Indian Ocean Territories is administered by the UK, with them receiving the registration money. Maybe the UK uses that money to finance its administration of those islands, but even so that would just be money it doesn't have to take out of the UK budget.
It would be a financial benefit to Mauritius to take over the administration of the IO domain as well as of the islands themselves.
For real! Just name that region the *Mauritius Indian Ocean Territory* and keep the massive revenue from it! (If Britain can call it that, so can Mauritius)
Rip all IO games
You can't even call them specific TLD games name after this...
Krunker is cooked
@@Helicopter3847 krunker was cooked when frvr walked into the room (although they seem to be actually doing something now)
Sweden owns the TLD for Niue (nu), basically by purchasing it from the island which only has a population of 1 500 or so. This is because nu means ”now” in Swedish so it became a very popular domain for e commerce.
My guess is that something similar can happen with io, UK can take over by simply purchasing the TLD.
The difference there is the country that bought the domain from continues to exist, so there is still a country to provide the right to use the domain.
@@ReedHarston What about .su? I think most people would agree that country doesn't exist and hasn't for a while.
(spoiler, its the soviet union)
Sweden didn't buy the domain, they bought the rights to it; if Niue ceased to exist, the domain would as well and it would still be impossible to distribute.
There is also .md domain which is owned by 🇲🇩 Republic of Moldova, but it's extensively used by doctors and clinics around the western world because MD also stands for Medical Doctor/Doctor of Medicine 🙃
While very unlikely, there is a small chance that in the future, Moldova and Romania might unite back, so the drama might start again around .md domain.
.su still exists even though the Soviet Union doesn't. Also nobody will just poof a TLD with millions of websites.
@@theairaccumulator7144 .su exists because of grandfather rights. Russia was supposed to shut it down, but they never got around to doing it. That won't happen now, because the rules won't allow it. IANA *might* allow someone to take it over, because if it gets entirely retired it could be resurrected if another country ends up with the ISO 3166 alpha-2 code IO, which would pose a security risk if someone registered currently existing names at that new future TLD registry.
@@theairaccumulator7144you tell Putin that and let us know how it goes
@@theairaccumulator7144 Soviet Union disappeared a long time ago, I think they updated the rules later to prevent new TLDs from staying like .su did.
Also Obsidian using .md as their domain because it is a markdown editor.
10:34 -When the dude the created the IP, UDP and TCP protocols needs to step in to fix it, you know it must have been serious
the timestamp takes you right to where he says "negro"
That's just it, we could be using protocols that dynamically found other hosts etc but the powers that be would rather that there were central points to be able to destroy and do not favor decentralized networks (Even although the internet technically is a decentralized network, see netsplit). Its all about standardization really and "freedom" of information, like you can't just get a domain name without paying someone for it....
Wait a min, idk about the IP/UDP but The Timestamp @10:34 i am sure that is taken out of context.
As someone who literally works on a .io domain (and a shareholder in the company) - so I'm obviously fairly biased - you might be surprised that I'm personally for the strict enforcement of these rules. The decision maker behind us choosing to use .io probably had no idea it was a ccTLD (Neither did I until I read this article earlier; good to know all 2-letter TLDs are ccTLDs).
There are few things I enjoy less than inconsistent rulings, and if ICANN can somehow stick to their own rules here, and overpower a multitide of multi-million/billion dollar companies (of which mine is far from one of them) I can respect them a lot more.
Might not need to. If the UK can have BIOT as an independent state, then so can Mauritius (eg as another commenter suggested, MIOT). Transfer is just a transfer. Since BIOT is effectively zero population this is a minimally disruptive solution that strongly benefits Mauritius and quo.
I would not be surprised if this happens. There are many possible solutions and this one is the most satisfying for all involved.
Overpowering corporations may sound nice, but is it really to anyone's benefit? Upkeeping that outdated country code system in the first place?
@@arcturuslight_ that I agree with, but that's a different angle entirely. If the result of this is "no more ccTLDs" ( which would certainly never happen) then that'd be even better
But what will happen to all the .io games?
@spin4team4096 unless they change there domaine they gonna cease to exist 😅
I remember one of the hosts of the Syntax podcast mentioned that he used to have a website with a .af domain. But once the Taliban took over Afghanistan, they seized the domain name and barred him from using it. Just goes to show how fragile the ownership of ccTLDs can be
Yeah.. ccTLDs are subject to whatever happens politically in a country as well as geopolitics, they are fragile.
I do use a number of domains in the ccTLD of the country of which I am a citizen, but for anything serious I use generic/global TLDs.
Fancy ccTLDs are certainly usefull for marketing purposes, and nothing wrong with using them for that, but never rely on them outside maybe the one of your home country provided it is stable and bound to exist for as long as you need it...
Dang, that's crazy .af
I don’t know as soon as heard Google and Microsoft will be affected I was not that worried. If they want to keep it around I am sure they will find the right people to pay off.
Maybe buying the island and creating the Corporate Idnian Ocean Territory.
yeah or they just tell them no make us switch and just host the servers them selves for it. this country shouldnt be allowed to disrupt this if so many places depend on it. or countries shouldnt be allowed to have these in the first place.
@@zerotheliger Maybe websites shouldn't be using ccTLDs of countries they don't operate in?
it would be the stupidest move ever by any government for mauritius to shut down the top level domain that rakes in so much revenue
But would they own it?
They have the land but would they own that?
@@GCAbleism158 i think that's likely, perhaps britain will keep it. that must have been part of the deal when they agreed on the land, i haven't heard about it
@@GCAbleism158 looks like no they have not. lawmakers were that stupid, leaving the most important part of the territory up in the air
That's so cute, you think it's a top level domain even though 90+ percent of internet users will probably never visit an IO website unless they are causal gaming. Too funny. We all know that if all IO websites disappeared overnight, most people on the internet wouldn't notice.
@@awesomeferret hahahaha you dont know who spends the majority of time on the internet.
.dd was also a domain that seized to exist. It was the TLD of East Germany but was dropped after the reunification. From what I could find it was never really used though, just assigned.
Tbf this was the early late 80's to 90'si would even be active for before the unification and at a time where having the internet was considered a luxury/nerd hobby
Chagos (officially British Indian Ocean Territory) had no permanent population, all the existing people having been carried off by the British (I guess this is technically ethnic cleansing). So .io was a country code without any people. Pretty risky.
The people of Chagos didn't get their land back by the way, it went to Mauritius, who had a decent legal claim over it. Chagosians aren't really happy about this outcome.
Which is why this .io case is more or less similar to the cases described earlier in the article. Just because the UK is handing it over occupied land does not necessarily mean they are handing it over to the right party or that the descendants of the indigenous people are going to acquiesce.
@@thevivariumforhalfmeasures7698 why this is different is that the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were bang-to-rights real countries, with real people in them, and seats at the UN and everything. BIOT was a territory of another state, with no people, no sovereignty, and no recognition. It was always a big long term risk when it came to TLDs.
@@thevivariumforhalfmeasures7698 there are only about 50 expected to return, so there's not really a choice no matter how annoyed they are, because you can't really have a functional self-governing state made up of 50 people (most of whom are going to be pensioners). It's crap for them, but it's just not practical in any way, realistically, the UK/US divesting means it has to be Mauritius taking over
@@DanielCouper-vf5zhpart of the fact there are so few, is the island most of them come from, no one is allowed to inhabit it "for the next 99 years"
@@t1nytim oh I know, it's horrendous what was done
I think this is a good reminder that the digital world is not a separate world. It’s all the same world. We have 1. It’s not some kind of transcendant departure from the material realm with its own endlessly stable laws and systems, it’s a bunch of wires and and committees lol
For now. Then we'll have 2 worlds. Then 3...
why does everything have to blow up on the internet at one point or another?
It's enough to deal with JS alone, now we have to keep an eye out for .io domains as well? Sigh.....
.js isn't a TLD... maybe we need to create another platform nation like Sealand.
Sssssshh don't give Google/Alpha any ideas! @@Kane0123
@@Kane0123js isnt a tld but its still hell
So, let me get this straight. A country literally *ceases to exist* and you care about a domain suffix? Am I reading this right?
@@PhilipAlexanderHassialisno one really gives a fk man. Indian ocean didn’t exist until the tld existed. Let’s be honest.
What I learned from this is, we need more countries to get all combinations of 2 letter TLDs.
676 to be exact. And by extension of your logic, once we hit the 676 country mark, we will no longer have any secessionist movements.
Let's split USA in its 50 states as independant.
@@Azarilh With how almost every state's laws are already so drastically different from the next, that wouldn't be as difficult as it probably sounds.
@@pacicidal fr
@@AzarilhProblem: a lot of state codes would overlap with existing ccTLDs. Arizona (AZ) over Azerbaijan, California (CA) over Canada, Nebraska (NE) over Niger…
As a Slovenian I find it hilarious we took the yu domain name. Btw yugoslavia broke up into 7 countries not just the 4 making the situation even more messy.
russia has both ru (russia) and su (soviet union), not to mention рф (cyrillic for rf - russian federation)
ended in 2010
didn't FR Yugoslavia take control of it? (Serbia and Montenegro)
Given that Google started the trend, Google should create a country called Input/Output to save us.
Google? Absolutely not. Elon should do it. Google would try to claim, manipulate, and control all sites using it.
Catalonia has its own TLD without ever having been a country. Why can't the .io TLD just keep existing?
.cat is for the language and culture. It is a gTLD not a 2 letter ccTLD
I think your skepticism is right. Unlike the examples used, where the TLD's would only ever be used as a ccTLD. TLD's like "fm", "gg", "io", "me", and "tv" have found heavy use outside the ccTLD space, and in the "io" case almost exclusively so. As such I think (hope) the the decision will ultimately be made to convert it to a gTLD, also creating an umbrella of protection for other TLD's that find their way into the common vernacular like "io".
Exactly what I think will happen
The rules says it can't be done. And I think those rules were there for years, so it shouldn't come as a surprise for .io domain owners that this could happen
@@se6369 Rules are meant to evolve with the times and the rules have been broken before (as mentioned in the video) to deal with special situations. I think this will be viewed as one of those special unforeseen situations that may actually result in a rules change. There is value in them changing the rule, as it increases the value of any domain using one of these ccTLD's, and increases confidence in the system overall. Yank away a TLD from millions of sites globally, and you erode the confidence in the system overall. There is an economic impact here as well that the rules simply cannot ignore. There is a lot of money in "io" and a lot of big brands using it, and branded around it. The economic pressure here will be extreme.
ICANN also puts themselves at risk by failing to adapt to the situation, their authority is only by convention, and as users of the internet we can point to an alternate source of authority for naming if we ultimately disagree (same way we got people in countries to bypass censorship walls in the past). If anyone remembers back in the early 2000's we had alternate TLD providers (new-dot-net comes to mind), before ICANN smartened up and expanded the gTLD's in 2010. One simply needed to point at a different set of root DNS servers, and you could resolve any of the new TLD's transparently along side of the currently "accepted" TLD's. This movement was slowly gaining traction until ICANN added to the gTLD's. Imagine for a moment if Google made such a change, and altered their root mirror to point at an alternate authority? This would open up the world to these altTLD's in an instant, as many rely on their public root DNS servers at 8-8-8-8 as a source of DNS authority. All it takes is the right people in the right places to make a change, and the rest of us will be blissfully unaware.
@@se6369 well it seems that YT ate my rather lengthy reply. Not going to retype it all, so here is the tldr of it.
Rules are meant to evolve with the times and there is precedent for breaking the rules in certain situations as mentioned in the video. I think this is a unforeseen situation that may actually result in a rules change before yanking away a TLD form thousands of domains globally. The economic pressure here will be enormous, and the consequences for ICANN could be dire if they do not adapt. ICANN exists by convention only, and if the right people in the right places decided to go around them they could. Back in the early 2000's we had altTLD providers, and that movement was growing eroding ICANN's authority until ICANN smartened up and expanded the gTLD's in 2010. If ICANN does decide to ignore the economic impact, I can see this becoming the wild west again with DNS, and alternate authority providers coming back into play.
Why should countries have their TLDs seized just because a bunch of westerners want to use them? Those countries use these TLDs as a source of income. What you're suggesting is international theft for the benefit of western corporations.
This is why you shouldn't use a TLD that doesn't represent the purpose AND geographical location of your entity. Treating TLDs which are bound to geographical locations as vanity TLDs puts you at risk of exactly this, and when this happens YOU WHO CHOSE your domain and TLD names are the only one to blame for your mistake. The minute I learned how TLDs worked as a teen decades ago, I understood this.
@@scbtripwire but if a vanity TLD drives or increases business or adoption or engagement to your website or service, you should utilize that tool at least as much as your competitors are. But you shouldn't expect the landscape to remain static forever, build your tools to be robust against (nearly) all forms of change or advertise that they won't last forever.
@@asailijhijr You don't need to make the same mistake your competitors make. The flaw with this reasoning is that a domain name builds trust as people use it. When that disappears, people will look elsewhere and may find look-alike clone sites which distribute malware instead of landing on the service's true new location. Not all .io services will know about this change before they get a chance to register a new domain and warn their users. Yes the .io registrar might send site owners a notice, but not all will receive it or take it seriously.
Pretty much. Seems like people are just assuming they should be bailed out for bad decisions they made here (yes, using country TLDs for a tech company and exposing yourself to geopolitical tensions is a bad long-term decision).
@@BrotherCheng Exactly. I had tried to answer the other guy and my answer got removed. :/
I even ran into an example of this today, a game which is no longer being updated which relies on a .io. Even if the service gets moved the game is still dead and will no longer be playable due to no longer getting updated and relying on .io.
@@BrotherCheng every site should have multiple domains, you don't want the same url with a different TLD to be a different company.
In Finnland theres a part called Åland. It has the .ax TLD. So if that island can do simmilar to Åland and be a sufficient autonom island in Maritius it may be saved :)
Google IO literally means Google British Indian Ocean Territory
I remember that Brexit caused many companies and individuals in the UK to lose their .eu domains, because the UK is not part of the EU anymore.
The situation is kinda dumber than that. Mauritius never owned that territory. Their claim is entirely invalid. Honestly, i really dislike how the article frames it as "it's finally being resolved!" No, it's always been "resolved". This is no different than if I pointed at your house/car and said "hey, I owned that, give it back", and it only gets "resolved" when you give up your property to me.
This is incorrect. The UK deliberately split off the islands from the colony of British Mauritius before it was granted independence in order to build a military base as requested by the Americans. This went against customary international law, British commitments to decolonization, and the UN Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.
How this got 42 likes is beyond me. The UK split off the Chagos Islands from Mauritius before giving its its independence. So actually yes, it is their territory and we never had a legitimate claim to it and your analogy is stupid
So basically incorrect use of TLDs is coming home to roost?
money talks
How is it incorrect use though? On the official website he showed it literally states:
"Anyone, anywhere can register"
There's also nothing in the sales terms and conditions which state you have to use it in a certain way.
@@philadams9254 I’d say it’s more about suitability for purpose, risk assessment, and design of the rules around country code domains than legality
If the owner of the TLD decides that vanity domains are an acceptable use, then by definition it's not misused.
@@philadams9254 it is incorrect because CC-TLDs are Country Code TLDs, if a country goes away, it goes away, if your website is not related to that country, it shouldn't be on a Country Code TLD. Marketing is irrelevant.
Their terms are also irrelevent because they are governed by IANA and IANAs terms apply and exceed their terms.
link rot’s about to go crazy
Can’t believe you didn’t catch this one:
In 2006. Montenegro migrated from yu to me 😊
Guernsey isn't so much of a country, as a big bank with a few roads, and a WHOLE lot of dirty money
Sounds like London, the British empire just became a bank. Just as the Roman empire became a church.
That escalated quickly
US people and geography.
And home to a breed of cattle, but that's neither here or there.
I mean Guernsey isn't a country at all
Adding some details. People like to point out that .su is still around so .io could also be around. But the difference is that the country code SU is still around, it's reserved, not removed. But IO will be removed. There's an important difference here.
Another precent is hk. When the British handed back Hong Kong to China, hk continued, and the regional government there is ultimately responsible for it. Same with Macau (mo) when Portugal handed that back to China.
This honestly feels like something the UN should get involved with, because this feels a lot more serious than usual.
"an island cluster"... I guess the word archipelago is too hard! Haha
For some reason, this made me think of "pirate linguist is quite superfluous" from Jack Sparrow by SkyMarshell Arts
I prefer that a bunch of small islands being near to each other to be called an island cluster.
Simplified vocabulary to accommodate lower reading comprehension?
@@retrictumrectus1010 okay but let's talk about kubernetes archipelago...
Why is this a surprise? If the TLD you choose is a ccTLD and there is no more country, there is no more TLD.
Not necessarily. .SU still exists, the Soviet Union does not.
@@Terigena does not _yet_. There is a certain somehow who misses it and tries to recreate it
@@modernkennnern ...but it does not. The existence of extremists doesn't qualify for a ccTLD
@@Terigena that's because a) SU is a code that is reserved indefinitely and b) the Russian government pleaded to keep it. Brits won't care about a random domain that isn't even controlled by the government, and they already has tons of domains (uk, ac, gg, je, im, vg, ky, sb, ms, pn, sh, tc, ai, bm, fk, gi, gs)
@@Terigena because Russia had no TLD of its own for 3 years after USSR collapsed, and nowadays refuses to comply to the request
Easiest solution I can think of:
Ownership of defunct domains should default to the IANA.
Then .io would become IANA's responsibility
Next question, should the regulators of domains be managing domains that have lapsed? Would they even have the resources to manage such a domain?
@@jl63023 They do have expertise about ir.
@@jl63023 They do have the expertise.
The problem here is that in most organizations i have worked in, the default is that the domains of that org are controlled by the PR units of these orgs. And not a lot of people know about internet governance, at least the PR units.
Even if the io TLD is spared, this seems like reason enough for anyone using it to start thinking about moving away from any cctld.
it should be handed to a Chagoan trust for the Chagoan people.
just dont fuck with the .dev domain and ill be ight
It's owned by Google and made publicly for devs to use. Unless Google does something, it should be good.
@@andresaliba because Google never kills its things
@@ojvribeiroGoogle Hangouts: “Why do I hear boss music?”
@@andresalibaIIRC it was sold to square space or something like that. I actually transferred my .dev domain to CloudFlare because square space was horrible.
@@ojvribeiro 🤣
.io games will become the atlantis of the internet... i can already imagine explaining what are .io games to my children in 15 years
As if people wouldn't just add a " dot cohm(because YT yaaay) " to the end of "IO". The solution to save IO games is hilariously simple, hence my cynicism about the silly hyperbole in this video.
@@awesomeferret many of those have parallel domains which aren't owned by the owners of the io ones
Self inflicted wound, honestly.
I guess I can be the one to take the controversial stance that decolonization can be prioritized over cute domain names
You don't understand, not having a specific couple of characters at the end of a website is a complete travesty! It's the worst thing that's happened in my life since starbucks didn't bring back my favorite seasonal menu item!
You're not even thinking about the impact on crypto startups man. Do you not have a heart?!
Decolonization??? Smh
@@Kane0123 ha ha
Nothing about the specific history of Chagos, Mauritius, and the UK confirms to the traditional story of colonisation. Standard priors don't apply here.
Now Google's gonna have to buy the Indian Ocean rip
I think this article should have cited the exact rules the IANA set up. That would have made this a lot more clear on the severity.
The point is, that there may be a point in (future) history, where a country could be founded with a claim for the same ISO-code. Would be crazy, but not impossible.
Hi, as someone from Mauritius I understand that the main point of the video is the .io however the way it skimmed through the reason why and the licensing was a bit insensitive given how the British have treated people from there and their modern day descendants. I think it's great to always learn a bit more about the history before proceeding and purchasing domains.
It’s not bad, just part of the process. We just need to research TLDs better instead of jumping on the hype.
I have to say these honest and authentic ad presentations is something refreshing and do generate interest to these companies.
An exception should *not* be made for the io domain
Since all two character TLDs are country codes, there should be increased visibility into what those special TLDs are, but the consequences of using those domains is on the web master just like any other domain
Should just require a presence in the country?
@@Kane0123 Yes, the country, which will no longer exist
I support this. There are rules in place, they make sense, they are quite clear (aka not ambigous) which means predictability. So we should strive for them to be respected, so they stay in place. Going against it will make things more ambiguous and, ultimately, complicated, which will not benefit us in the long run.
@@Winnetou17 why should normal people care about the arbitrary rules created when the internet was a completely different place? The times of "webmasters" are long gone. Strictly following silly rules about that 2 letters could only represent a country and country-related things benefits only people on a spectrum who like things nicely sorted and organized, reduces opportunities for business branding, and makes no difference to ordinary people
@@svuvich I said why...
If normal people don't care, that means they won't care the other way around either. If we're honest, normal people don't care that much about domain names anyway. They're not typing them, and in many situations they're not seeing them either. Many people use their phones where apps rule. And apps don't show domain names.
Yeah, it reduces branding opportunities. But it's not like it's terrible without it, like they have no way of expressing themselves. I'm not worried about businesses at all.
11:00 Yeah random countries, like .us another ccTLD owned by a random country.
Yeah, if only there where a system to know which TLDs are country TLDs! 😅
(For anyone not knowing: 2-letter TLDs are cTLDs.)
.us is the ccTLD for the United States.
@@dieselbaby Yeah exactly.
.io is not owned by the UK government, not sure how they assign ccTLDs by ICANN but they gave it to some random guy in the 90s who has sold it to another company since so doubt the UK gov will get involved since they make no money from it anyway. I think it will go and some private equity firm which owns it will take the loss.
under iCANN rules the control of ccTLDs belongs, _irrevocably_, to the sovereign government with jurisdiction over the territory associated with the ccTLD. the sovereign can delegate this control to anyone it wants, but the authority to alter or revoke this delegation always lies with that sovereign. thus, when the indian east ocean territory still existed as a legal entity, the UK was the government that had the (non-transferrable) authority to decide who controlled it. the problem with .io is that _this territory no longer exists_: it was extinguished when the UK agreed to recognize mauritius as the lawful sovereign with jurisdiction over that territory. since the territory no longer exists, its ISO CC will also be extinguished, and thus also the ccTLD
the only way to alter this state of affairs is to change ICANN's rules, which would be nontrivial. ICANN is a very strange organization, a sort of hybrid of a domestic nonprofit corporation (ICANN is legally incorporated as a charitable entity in California) acting as a trade association and a non-governmental organization under the law of nations, although it does not have the sort of organizing treaty document or similar protocol that most NGOs do. i suspect that one of the reasons ICANN will move very softly on this issue is that ICANN prefers its present governance, which is largely controlled by corporate interests, to what they'd end up with if they were to transition to a true NGO, which would likely result in them becoming a United Nations member agency similar to ICAO or ITU. i also suspect that either the ITU or even the UPU would be glad to take over ICANN.
@@notacow69 I actually looked this up, seems the UK Gov have said they never had control or received any income from it.
Back when it was registered you could email IANA, then only 2 people and if you could prove you had the skills they would let you manage it.
The real conversation that needs to take place is why two-character domains are country-owned when that is clearly not how the internet operates presently. There needs to be a reckoning between the real-world use and these rules.
It is clearly how virtually all 2 letter TLDs are used. .io, .ai etc are rather the exceptions.
And beyond that, if we start changing the 'rules' because some people refused to actually look into what they are using because they thought it is fancy, that entire internet thing soon will stop working.
@@c128stuffwe could have more strict enforcement over how ccTLDs are used and revoke ccTLDs that are mis-used. Ultimately the owner of the TLD has to allow all these foreign businesses to use their TLD, knowing that they are not advertising themselves as an entity from the country that owns the TLD. We could revoke TLDs from countries that do this, and prevent them from using ownership of a TLD as a means of gathering some level of rent from companies that want to leverage the TLD for unintended purposes.
I’m not saying that’s good policy necessarily, but it’s not like the companies who purchase these domains are the only ones “breaking the rules” here, the owner of the TLD bears some culpability.
tuvalu is not going to be on board with this; roughly 8% of their national revenue comes from fees collected by licensing out their top-level domain
@@notacow69 Tuvalu will literally not exist in a couple of years due to rising waters (At least the island. There's currently a plan to digitalize the country but who knows what happens next?)
Exactly this.
There should also be some serious debate about how a single entity, the IANA, (existing with zero international oversight) is allowed this level of control over what is essentially a information backbone of our entire planet.
Its high time we scrapped the exiting DNS model to be honest. Its far too vulnerable to coercion by powerful nation state actors (looking at the USA since almost all IANA offices are located there). A decentralized system would be far better suited to the fractured nature of our world.
Given the comment about how much money these TLDs can bring in to small countries, this could have a huge impact on them and people who invested in generic TLDs. If .io goes away, I’d imagine the price for country code domains will fall and the money will shift to holders of other TLDs.
this would be illegal. they purchased a domain, they keep it or it's stolen money. anyone grandfathered in should keep their domains.
Couldn’t Mauritius simply keep the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) as a separate territory under its sovereignty, similar to how Britain currently administers it? They could potentially rename it to MIOT or something similar. This seems like a straightforward solution.
yes, well said. Someone with money will likely make that call, and the money does talk. There is no good reason for Mauritius to decline, especially when BIOT has literally no population (meaning no actual time or effort investment, just a name change).
You mean .su is not an abbreviation of sus?
Wouldn't that be .ss ?
@@Liggliluff Now that's a great idea: an .ss domain. I think the world is ready.
@@Siderite You better be, because that's South Sudan, allocated in 2011.
@@Liggliluff Yeah, realized right after I wrote it. Those sites must be fun.
Correct pronunciation of Mauritius is “more-rish-us”
Correct
"Myrrh-rish-us". "Myrrh" as in the Myrrh and Frankincense they gave to Jesus. "Us" pronounced more like "ess", the same way as the "us" at the end of tetanus.
Currently living there ,the way he pronunce it …😂
@@Jwareness Good shout. Subtle difference but probably more how I would pronounce it too
Smarty-pants
Why hasn't anyone thought of making Jupiter's moon Io its own country, and giving THAT the .io domain?
The next big one in danger is .tv. It’s the ccTLD for Tuvalu. Tuvalu, a small atoll nation in the South Pacific Ocean is literally sinking under the ocean due to global warming and is constancy losing land area. Australia has started to take its residents as they gradually get displaced. So in the coming years Tuvalu as a nation will cease to exist. Making .tv domains a risky proposition.
A generic tld can be restricted too ! Most of them are owned by private companies that can impose their conditions as long as it respects their original agreement with the ICANN. Most of them (if not all) are easily accessible tho, you just have to rent them as usual.
I ALWAYS THOUGHT THAT IT MEANT"INTERACTIVE ONLINE"
It’s pronounced “maw-rish-us”
PS I love how the article is published on a Tongan ccTLD 😆
Tons of browser games are about to die
ccTLD, gTLD... My first thought is, why not have "legacy TLDs" (gTLD)? Once a ccTLD is set to disappear, ownership could transfer to either the new country, or ICANN. I'm sure there's lots of issues with such an approach, but just retiring an entire TLD is also not without problems
And I doubt a new country code (both the 2 and 3 letter ones) will be allocated to a former one or it could confuse things when using old data.
I don't think ICANN would really want to take on a ccTLD, ccTLDs are way less restricted than normal TLDs and it sets a really weird precedent.
@@itskdog Country codes can be reassigned and have been reassigned before. AI, CS, GE, and SK are such examples.
Eventually you'll run out of two letter TLDs for countries then
So this is mainly just about Top Level Domain Retirement... that's the TLDR.
I guess it's obvious what will happen - they have to be seen legally decommissioning it, but they know the ubiquity of it in tech too. Nothing stops them using after the fact.
When Yugoslavia broke up in the 2000s, the Serbian government became in charge of transitioning websites to Serbian or Montenegran domains. Only websites that didn't transition were deleted when the ending was retired in 2010. I would be shocked if a similar things wasn't done for people with .io domains: sure their new domain isn't as cool, but the websites themselves still exist and I think that's important.
Yes the domain is just a link to the server. The server isn't stored on the domain. You can swap the domain and it's the same server. You can for example access UA-cam by a variety of top domains.
yeah honestly this is good, even if the short term consequences are going to suck. maybe we would all do well to put a little more into what tlds we choose
How about we just completely divorce the domain names from the concept of physical countries? 90% of the national TLDs are used for foreign companies anyway. The whole design was a massive scam from the start.
I don't have much sympathy for companies abusing a random country code to get a "fancy" domain name. It completely breaks the expectation that country codes refer to countries! And of course when a country somehow ceases to exist it doesn't make sense to maintain a domain name referring to that old country. Everyone will know what the new domain is, it's obviously the new country code that the company now serves, assuming everyone uses domain names as intended.
It only becomes a problem when you abuse the country codes for a basically a pun with no actual connection to the country.
(Hard to write comments about domain names without accidentally having the comment be deleted for containing a url)
Claiming that this is "abusing" a ccTLD is more than a tad bit hyperbolic. The internet is a much, much different place than it was when these domains were created in the first place, plus, the idea that somehow the companies/brands which are registering and utilizing the .io ccTLD are abusing the country code for a cool domain name is made even more ridiculous when you consider that the actual parties responsible for the maintenance of the TLD itself had sold off the rights/control over it a few decades ago, similar to how the government of Tuvalu did for the .tv ccTLD, to a private commercial registrar so as to allow them to facilitate registrations and earn income.
@@dieselbaby Okay, maybe "abuse" is too strong and implies too much malice; but using a country code for something completely unrelated to said country, i.e. for a pun or otherwise fancy domain name is definitely "misuse"/"using it incorrectly".
The fact that the maintainers and registrars are making it easy to misuse the country code for such uses doesn't make it a "correct" use of the country codes. But of course these registrars who are deliberately selling a country code as a "generic" TLD despite knowing well it's not are even more to blame for the misuse than the buyers who have been misled by them, especially if it's a random civilian who's bought it. But I would expect a company to do a minimum of research on how domain names actually work before basing their entire branding on a domain name.
@@SteinGauslaaStrindhaug It is only an abuse if the domain owner decides it is abuse.
The ethics of the British Indian Ocean Territory (io) is not great though, and is why the land is being transferred back.
One thing that should not be ignored is the fact that a domain is an asset that makes money to the one that holds it. When territories secede or pass hands, there are usually negotiations of how to handle certain assets. If things are left unclear in those negotiation or a debate arises, there is a good chance IANA will just fall back on their rules rather than getting tied up in all of that (with possibly extending a grace period on how long existing domains can remain). What's more, glancing over Wikipedia, it seems that .io already has some controversy on how it has been handled
Maybe a new country could be created for the purpose of registering the io abbreviation with ISO and thus maintain continuity of .io with IANA. It would just have to be admitted to the United Nations with a 2/3rds vote.
That's so stupid I can't even ...
I learned this in the early 2000s when i tried to register "teh" as a company in the Cook Islands. Nathan Barley got one, it's well plastic. Keep it livid, yeah.
they could make a "generic" domain like .i-o and move to that or smtn like that
We still use SU domain and did not discontinue it. As Russia is an official inheritor of the SU by repaying all of its debt, we are the rightful owner of the SU domain. Therefore, if the all islands of BIOT would be transferred to Mauritius with all the installations there, the Mauritius would gain rights to everything BIOT including the -io domain. It then would become its owner in addition to its own domain. This actually can spearhead the economy as Mauritius is exceptionally poor.
Difference is that the code SU is still reserved to this day, so .su sticks around. While YU has been removed and .yu has been removed.
While the incorrect use of TLDs should be curbed, I feel like the IANA should have some coordination to have processes for phase-outs like with .io. If you have to phase out one because of this kind of issue (or people using a terrible one like .mp4), IANA should at least take back the TLD in and say to owners "you have up to 6 months to migrate your domain, or up to 1 year if your domain's license is longer, to swap out of your license"
The IANA could make an exception to their rules, and let .io become the only two letter gTLD. They'd probably want some sort of agreement with the ISO to avoid them reusing io as a country code though.
I always thought it was stupid for people to use country code domains for purposes other than what they were intended, which was to be specific to things about that country. People who used .io or such rather than a non-country-specific TLD only have themselves to blame.
Aren't the IANA guys smart enought to just keep it? Like instead of disrupting and destroying, change the standard 🤷🏽♂
I feel like a “bailout” along these lines is the most likely outcome
State and Intl bodies don’t have the same flexibility that people or companies do. People working there may have the same idea you do, but can’t implement due to limitations of law or treaty. The only way to change something like this is with either new laws, or sufficient pressure from the right places to ignore the rule.
yes and they most likely will... the tld “su” still exists to this day, and there’s no Soviet Union. Registration of them is still allowed as well, so the author of this article did basically 0 research.
@@gabrielpi314 They could take it over and say no new registrations and let Verisign manage it (who already manages root zone along with, com, net, org... for ICANN). Basically just keep it spinning as is.
The problem with su is they let Russia manage it while just getting a promise of no new registrations and that is it with no way to enforce that restriction.
Finally, if we were going to go by ISO 3166 2 letter country codes but due to the fact it was being used before that standard was written, UK generally uses uk (with a special exception) and not gb (UK controls both, some uk government sites where under gb for a bit but it doesn't accept new registrations and has basically disappeared from use).
@@Kas-tleIt was mentioned the rules changed after that, wasn't it?
Now that Dodo Land has gained The Chaos Islands, perhaps they'll be ready to restart their bioengineering project...
“I’m terrified and you should be too”. Very sensationalist by the one person everyone expects to be over the top lol
But if they do keep it running as a generic domain, what do they do if a new country that IS abbreviated "IO" forms? Just willy nilly transfer over the generic domain to them?
io does NOT mean input output it means web browser games
One thing that probably was a huge mistake was even having country codes at all. Countries are born live and die. They break up, they get annexed, and sometimes more powerful country is decide that they would prefer it if no one remembered a country ever existed and start pressuring ngos to refuse to acknowledge them. This has been an issue for Unicode and the flag emojis. For instance many Vietnamese Americans resent that the three stripe flag of South Vietnam is not the Vietnamese flag in Unicode and is not represented in Unicode at all. The same is true of many Southerners with a revisionist view of the Confederacy who demand a Confederate flag emoji.
There are certain things that need to be able to last indefinitely. Link rot is a real problem and TLD's disaapearing contributes to it. If there were no country codes the politics of whether or not a country gets a code would be rendered moot.
I am working in the tech-field of medical applications. This is a typical occurrence in this field. Billions if not trillions of dollars are lost in the blink of an eye when you do not respect the regulations. Yes, more than whatever Apple is worth is lost in the blink of an eye. All hail the regulations (which are there for a good reason).
I missed this one on stream! Really shocking to see a domain that is THIS widely used dissapear.
Tbh I don't like io domains and try to avoid sites who use them lol
Past that a simple search shows it's not going anywhere lol
I think they'll give it a special designation controlled by themselves or Britain. The country that now has that land back under control isn't wanting the name at all. And with the importance of tech/web name integration with IO, they'll be swayed to see the pro's v con's here, it'll be better for the internet as a whole to keep IO active and in use specifically for tech web use.
4:02 Nailed it
The Old Guard (com, net, org, gov, edu, ...) are never going anywhere. When you pollute the namespace with every g.. d... word in the dictionary, it's inevitable some of them will eventually disappear. (and in my book, 150% of them are just spammer crap.) The ccTLD's (country code) were _supposed_ to be identities for those countries, not BS ways to spell words with a domain name. But ICANN allowed each country to set their own rules, and instantly the ccTLD's became a gold mine.
I would love to see io deleted, just for the hubris of the internet to be brought in check, for adopting a ccTLD for the "aesthetic", rather than it's intended use.
whats the intended use for .moe and .gay then
@@StellaEFZ those are just regular TLDs, not country code TLDs
@@timj11dude same stuff is going on with .tv
@@timj11dude ah my bad, I didnt read the cc part of your comment, sorry
Why should domain names be locked to countries to begin with though, no one is asking that it seems like 🤔
As someone who actually did his due diligence and read about the Chagossians since 2016, I'm surprised this didn't came any sooner.
The internet is alot larger than it used to be, and a policy change here is 100% neccesary. The .io ownership needs to be given to either the UK or Mauritius, there is no other functional solution.
This is so stupid, the area will still be known as 'British Indian Ocean' or simply 'Indian Ocean' after the treaty is signed, so therefore the domain should stay, however it makes sense that it wont.
It's 10000% extremely unlikely that the domain continues to exist, if the UK government managed it instead, it would probably cause controversy and the new government is avoiding that as much as possible, so it's much easier to let Mauritius sunset the domain themselves.
9:14 My brother in science, we live in a SOCIETY