Although it may not appear in many of the balance sheets with the most important events of the year that will be published this week, history will surely remember 2024 as the moment when finally England gave up its last colony in Africa, the Chagos Islands.
This event not only represented vindication for a population that has been fighting for self-determination for decades, but also put center stage a problem entrenched at the heart of the web…who owns an Internet domain?
The delivery of the Chagos Islands, located in the Indian Ocean, to the Republic of Mauritius by Great Britain closes a chapter in the history of colonialism and ends several years of dispute in international courts by the Chagossians, an Afro-Asian ethnic group that was expelled from their lands last century.
But the decision to transfer the islands to his nation endangered one of the most coveted domains on the Internet: “.io”.
It’s the one used by Github.io, the gaming site itch.io, and even the popular Google I/O conference. In English, the acronym is the abbreviation for input / output, which makes it very coveted.
Domain as country code
The “.io” domain is a country code, so its destiny is linked to that of the corresponding nation, just as everything “.ar” is linked to Argentina.
Therefore, the disappearance of the British Indian Ocean Territory will force several international organizations to update their recordsincluding the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), responsible for creating and delegating top-level domains.
Thus the million and a half Sites ending with “.io” will disappear at the turn of the year.
Attentive to various requests for help, The Mauritius authorities agreed to maintain the domain for five more years exceptionally. What will happen next is anyone’s guess, but it serves as a reminder of how technology is no stranger to sociopolitical changes.
A group of Chagosians in Port Louis (Mauritius). / EFE/EPA/DAI KUROKAWAThis is not, of course, the first case of its kind. On September 19, 1990, the IANA created and delegated the .su top-level domain to the USSR. Just six weeks later, the Berlin Wall fell and began the chain of events that would lead to the collapse of the USSR.
At that time, no one thought about what should happen to the .su domain: the Internet, as we know it, was still years away. So the domain was given to Russia to operate alongside its own (.ru). The Russian government agreed that it would eventually close but never did.
Today sites ending in .su are virtually outlawed and there are many suspicions that It is used by Moscow for disinformation and espionage operationsin addition to hosting pirate sites and others linked to cybercrimes. It is estimated that there are more than one hundred thousand sites that use that domain without the IANA being able to do much about it.
In times where a good domain name can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps The government of Mauritius finds a way to continue using “io” without seeing its sovereignty diminished.
