“Once this treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist,” tech historian Gareth Edwards wrote in a recent blog post. “The International Standard for Organization (ISO) will remove country code ‘IO’ from its specification. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which creates and delegates top-level domains, uses this specification to determine which top-level country domains should exist. Once IO is removed, the IANA will refuse to allow any new registrations with a .io domain.”
The IANA will then begin the process of retiring the .io sites that already exist, he added, resulting in “the loss of one of the tech and gaming industry’s preferred top-level domains.”
It’s not just a matter of national pride, either. Companies pay to have the coveted .io domain at the end of their URL, with native Chagossians claiming it’s worth $50 million—a payday they say they’ve been cheated out of by Western colonizers.
read more (INC magazine)
The IANA will then begin the process of retiring the .io sites that already exist, he added, resulting in “the loss of one of the tech and gaming industry’s preferred top-level domains.”
It’s not just a matter of national pride, either. Companies pay to have the coveted .io domain at the end of their URL, with native Chagossians claiming it’s worth $50 million—a payday they say they’ve been cheated out of by Western colonizers.
read more (INC magazine)
