For people who haven’t been following this story, the Chagos islanders don’t want companies to stop using the .io domain, they want to receive the registration fees, which is much more important to them than having the TLD go away.
Unfortunately, because the territory is going to Mauritius instead of to the Chagos islanders, IANA is killing the TLD entirely (since Mauritius already has their own country TLD).
Or more likely, they will just move the domain to be a generic TLD instead of a country code TLD, due to it’s popularity in the tech space.
i’d rather they return chagos to the islanders
I don’t really know anything about Chagos, but is that really what the islanders want? A quick google suggests the islanders might find it difficult to agree.
Most micro island nations just aren’t viable as a sovereign nation in 2024. They need air travel, health services, telecommunications, building materials, food imports, education, et cetera. Sadly they just aren’t able to produce anything of any value with which to pay for all of those things.
In many cases they end up trading their sovereignty for political positions. It looks like there’s already a detention centre for sri lankans in Chagos. China will happily pay then millions a year for them not to recognise Taiwan as a sovereign state, which is kinda ironic.
Nauru is a fairly interesting island nation. They sold the rights to their phosphate (bird poo) 80 (?) some years ago, and after it was extracted they were left with a moon scape. Sadly they squandered the money with some comically bad investments, including a broadway production IIRC. Health outcomes are pretty terrible.
It looks like there’s already a military base in Chagos, so I guess that’s something they can trade on.
Another problem with sovereignty is migration rights. If you’re born somewhere like that you would absolutely want the opportunity to go to university in Australia or UK or similar.
i think at the very least the chagossians would like to be included in negotiations instead of having their islands traded between the UK and Mauritius without their involvement
Yes. I think it would be hard to find anyone who thinks chagossians should not be consulted in determining what happens with their island.
The stark reality is that it’s probably just not possible, in any meaningful way.
I have first hand experience in this type of negotiation with community / minority group trying to navigate the best outcomes for them with their limited resources, although of course nothing so dramatic as deciding what to do with an island.
The first problem you encounter is that their is very limited governance within the group, or no governance, or extraordinarily poor governance which is acting against the best interests of the group. Straight off the bat you can end up mediating internal disputes which might be generational feuds. For chagossians, you might ask who gets consulted and are they reasonable representatives of the group.
The next problem you encounter is that the demands of the group may very likely be unreasonable and unachievable, and the group might become hostile if they are unmet. For example you might think possible outcomes in this circumstances are stay with UK, join Mauritius, or become a sovereign nation. What happens if the group demands a fourth option, a new island, in the mid latitudes, unpopulated, potential for local fishing industry, et cetera. You can’t really negotiate with a group that would make such a demand.
Another problem is that, well, the stark reality is that maybe the Chagossians don’t really have any meaningful options. What’s the point of negotiating if the only potential outcome is being subsumed by Mauritius and accepting whatever they will provide.
In addition, no matter how much you consult with them, there will always be someone that says they weren’t consulted and they’re bitter because they didn’t receive their new tropical island.
Finally, if things need to be resolved in a timely manner, then involving the Chagossians isn’t going to achieve that. The only option is to hand them over to Mauritius and let them manage all of these issues that have been simmering away since the dawn of time.
the warning for future tech founders is clear: Be careful when picking your top-level domain. Physical history is never as separate from our digital future as we like to think.
Kinda ironic this is published to a website with a .to ccTLD for the Kingdom of Tonga.
My former company had a .bb domain for internal services because it rhymed with the name. We had constant outages whenever a storm was hitting Barbados…
Interesting, that’s not something I ever thought about. I just looked up the nameservers for .bb:
;; ANSWER SECTION:
bb. 86400 IN NS ns5.nic.bb.
bb. 86400 IN NS ns3.nic.bb.
bb. 86400 IN NS ns2.nic.bb.
bb. 86400 IN NS ns1.nic.bb.
bb. 86400 IN NS ns4.nic.bb.
bb. 86400 IN NS ns6.nic.bb.
It seems like ns1.nic.bb doesn’t resolve, and for 2-6, they’re all in either 64.68.192.0/20 or 64.119.192.0/20, so it does look like a small concentration in root nameservers which could be unavailable in a storm.
