On October 3, the British government announced that it was giving up sovereignty over a small tropical atoll in the Indian Ocean known as the Chagos Islands. The islands would be handed over to the neighboring island country of Mauritius, about 1,100 miles off the southeastern coast of Africa. 

The story did not make the tech press, but perhaps it should have. The decision to transfer the islands to their new owner will result in the loss of one of the tech and gaming industry’s preferred top-level domains: .io.

This is nuts. I get it, reading through the history of top-level domains there’s good reason to retire a domain based on greater geopolitical changes. 

However, as someone who has always strove to own my little piece of the internet, and not be at the whims of tech giants and social media platforms, it saddens me that even something as perceivably solid as a domain can still be a shaky foundation to build a business on top of. 

The IANA may fudge its own rules and allow .io to continue to exist. Money talks, and there is a lot of it tied up in .io domains. However, the history of the USSR and Yugoslavia still looms large, and the IANA may feel that playing fast and loose with top-level domains will only come back to haunt it.

I really hope so. .io is a fantastic TLD and I hope there’s some workaround. Also, I can’t even imagine what would happen with the businesses built on it, do they have some sort of expiration to work against?

Via Every.to