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I looked up the Wikipedia page.

The only inhabitants are British and United States military personnel, and associated contractors

Oh, ok. That's not too bad actually.

The forced removal of Chagossians from the Chagos Archipelago occurred between 1968 and 1973.

Oh.

Today, the Chagossians are still trying to return, but the UK government has repeatedly denied them the right of return despite calls from numerous human rights organisations to let them.

Ooohhh....

On 3 November 2022, it was announced that the UK and Mauritius had decided to begin negotiations on sovereignty over the British Indian Ocean Territory, taking into account the international legal proceedings.

Ok, getting better...

However, in December 2023, it was reported that the UK government was planning to discontinue the talks.

Oh, it's worse, actually.

Same for .nu, the TLD for Niue, which is used by businesses in the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden, where "nu" means "now". It's been taken over by a Swedish company, and they, backed by the Swedish government, refuse to give it back or share the profits, saying it's "essential for Swedish internet infrastructure". Colonialism at it's finest.

And just for context: Niue has about 1500-2000 inhabitants, and it is estimated that they missed out on about $150 million in revenue since 2013. That's $100000 per capita, and a revenue stream that's more than their entire GDP.

Look, not defending colonialism, but the British Indian Ocean Territory doesn't have a native population anymore. 100% of those living on the island are UK and US military personnel. For the past 50 years it's been a military base.

The largest chunk of the revenue from .io domain sales go to Name.com, who owns the ccTLD, with only a small portion going to the UK government after ICANN et al takes their piece. There are only 270K registered .io domains, averaging $36/year in registration fees each, so the whole pie is less than $10M annually.

The circumstances leading to this arrangement are completely indefensible, and there is a movement to grant the right of return to the surviving Chagossians and their families, including a 2021 UN resolution rejecting the sovereignty of the UK over the islands.

If you actually want to support the surviving Chagossian people, get involved in international political activism and fight for their right to return to their homeland. If they should succeed, they will be entitled to their own ccTLD that they can profit from freely like other small countries, and the .io ccTLD could face termination as result of BIOT no longer being a legal territory - though, not strictly, the Soviet Union's .su ccTLD still exists today, and it could be beneficial to transfer ownership of the ccTLD to the Chagossians, but that can only happen after they are able to reclaim their territory.

Always interesting to see the remnants of the old empires. Countries like the UK and France still having little splatters of control across the world like the last bits of black mould you can't reach.

I'm curious, are places like Hawai'i seeing similar movements? I know that area has a bit of an odd history.

It's not like a internet domain is a natural resource of any territory.

They are just made up by icann.

Oof interesting.

I own a patriotic .ca myself.

Is this true of .ai? Anguilla owns it and is a British territory.

Wow, colonist.io (the catan clone) seems a bit ironic now

Map Men did a good video on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD4hxKkqR4E

Map Men. Map Men. Map Men Men Men Men

I'm not sure .io should even exist. Why would the Chagossians call themselves anything that would abbreviate to "IO" to begin with?

If you buy cute domains, be prepared that it can go to shit.

.AF was owned by the Taliban.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/12/24071036/queer-af-mastodon-taliban-shut-down-afghanistan

Io games still exist. Stuff like gats.io, diep.io, or evades.io still have small but loyal player bases

Fun fact: I used to work as a fraud analyst for aajor telecom company. British Indian Ocean territory islands were extremely high fraud destinations for telecom fraud. I always assumed the people there were basically making ends meet through fraud. (Usually hacking corporate PBX systems and directing phone traffic to premium rate service lines there) But I think it's more likely that the phone companies there aren't so much committing the fraud, but facilitate it with their PRS lines where they surely keep some of the revenue generated.

I am kind of puzzled that I am not finding that many .it domain names for tech.

EDIT: I looked it up. I forgot it is only available for EU entities. I am one, and got one of them registered for my personal projects a while back. Now I remember sending a document id with the registration to the registrar.