this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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Kind of good in a way. It was always colonialism for tech companies to be using it anyway, when it wasn't meant for them.
I mean IANA or whatever literally made up a standard where two letter TLDs were reserved for countries even if they aren't how those countries refer to themselves, see gr for Greece. I'm assuming .io just stands for Indian Ocean in this case, which seems like probably not how the chagosans self identify. Then you have countries like Montenegro that have .me and realized it means something in English so capitalized on it by licensing a company to resell .me domains.
I don't think I have any particular point other than I think it's dumb to have a system of artificial scarcity be the only alternative to having to remember the IP of every damn site I want to use.
British Indian Ocean Territory, it was just shortened to .io so it would fit into the naming scheme.
If IANA has all two letter domains reserved for countries, than why is there no .uk?
That's a great question and the answer can be found in the wikipedia entry for the .uk domain.
In a nutshell the volunteer "Naming Committee" setup back in 1985 established a rule that entities needed to register into specific subdomains based on entity type such as .co, where the .co part stood for "Company". They did this to make managing registrations easier and to provide an "at a glance" way to see what kind of website you were visiting (commercial, government, charity, etc). The "Naming Committee" was extremely strict about ensuring that domains were registered to a specific entity and in the correct subdomain.
By the mid-90s the volunteer "Naming Committee" was entirely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of domains being registered so that volunteer group was replaced by Nominet UK. Nominet didn't open the .uk TLD to registration until 2014 and by then the subdomain thing (.co.uk) was so embedded into the United Kingdom's internet structure that it had become tradition and NOT using was confusing to many people.
There's more subdomains than just .co as well and both wikipedia articles I linked list them.
tl;dr .uk absolutely exists in the UK, it's just used differently than almost anywhere else in the world.
Canada uses gc.ca for federal government sites, and I think every province gets their own, too, like .bc.ca (but I don't know if they all use them.)
I didn't know about Canada and after thinking about it for a minute the United States does something similar for the States with .gov. Many, if not all, States have their own subdomain such as wyo.gov, montana.gov, and nebraska.gov.
Honestly it's always seemed wrong and somewhat confusing that non-country specific TLDs, such as .gov, are dedicated to the United States.
There is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk
i've seen a lot of .uk sites around
Unfortunately the IANA decided to kill the TLD altogether, but the Chagos islanders have been asking to get control of it themselves so they can receive the registration fees. This was sort of the worst of both worlds: they could have given the Chagos islands it's own TLD, or given control of .io to the Chagos islanders, but instead they just said, "you're not sovereign, so you get nothing".
edit: I'm reading elsewhere that it's not yet decided for sure whether to kill the TLD, but no one seems to think it will be given to the Chagossians, unfortunately.
I don’t get why they killed it. some regional areas have their own TLD. .cat for Catalonia, for example.
Two letters TLD like
.ioare ISO country codes. Catalonia's.catis a generic TLD in comparison. Since.iostands for the British Indian Ocean Territory and Chagos Island isn't going to be 'separate' anymore by becoming part of Mauritius, IANA's logic is that the ccTLD has to be retired. That.suis still around after the collapse of USSR isn't a valid argument for them.ok. I was not aware the two letter TLD were more restricted than the others. thanks!
Technically, they haven't yet. In the past they've sometimes transitioned ownership of country-code TLDs over (like the Soviet Union's .su to Russia). I think they just don't want to wade into the debate over the Chagos Islands in general.