The .io domain may disappear. How geopolitics affects domain names

On October 3, the British government announced that it was refusing from sovereignty over a small tropical atoll in the Indian Ocean known as the Chagos Islands. The islands will be transferred to the neighboring island nation of Mauritius, about 1,100 miles off the southeast coast of Africa.

The story did not make it into the technical press, and, apparently, in vain. The decision to transfer the islands to a new owner will result in the loss of one of the most popular top-level domains in the technology and gaming industry: .io.

Be it Github.io, gaming site itch.io or even Google I/O (which arguably set the trend in 2008), .io is a constant presence in the tech lexicon. His popularity is sometimes due to the way he represents an abbreviation for “input/output” or data received and processed by any system. What is often ignored is that this is more than just a funny domain. This is a top level domain with country code (ccTLD) is government-related, meaning it touches on politics far beyond the digital world.

Since 1968, the UK and US have operated a major military base on the Chagos Islands (officially known as the British Indian Ocean Territory), but the neighboring state of Mauritius has always disputed British sovereignty over them. The Mauritian government has long argued that the British illegally retained control when Mauritius gained independence. It took more than 50 years, but this dispute was finally resolved. In exchange for a 99-year lease on the military base, the islands will become part of Mauritius.

Once this treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist. Various international bodies will update their records. Specifically, the International Standard of Organization (ISO) will remove the country code “IO” from its specifications . The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which creates and delegates top-level domains, uses this specification to determine which country top-level domains should exist. After removal of IANA IO will stop allowing any new registrations in the .io domain. It will also automatically begin the process of terminating existing ones. (There is no official count of the number of .io domains in existence.)

It's official that .io – and countless websites – will disappear. At a time when domains can cost millions of dollars it's a shocking reminder that there are forces outside the internet that still influence our digital lives.

When will domains outlive countries?

Removing an entire country or territory from the world map is incredibly rare, so one might wonder why the process for removing a domain is so elaborate. So automatic. So… final .

The answer is simple: history.

Two organizations are responsible for domains and Internet addresses. IANA decides what should be a top-level domain and what should not, such as .com, .org, .uk or .nz. The organization originated at the University of Southern California, although it was only formalized in 1994 when it won a US contract. For several years it operated as a small research and management committee. As the Internet grew, it became clear that a more formal structure was required. By 1998, IANA became part of a new organization: the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN, based in the United States, has been given greater responsibility for overseeing the stability of the Internet and providing representation for international interests.

These two organizations may seem to occupy mundane positions. But they found themselves making some of the toughest decisions on the global Internet.

On September 19, 1990, IANA created and delegated the .su top-level domain for the USSR. Less than a year later, the USSR collapsed. At that time, no one thought about what was going to happen to the .su domain—the Internet as we know it was still years away. Therefore, the .su domain was transferred to Russia to work in parallel with its own (.ru). The Russian government has agreed that it will eventually be closed, but clear rules for its management or when this should happen have not been defined.

But ambiguity is the worst thing a top-level domain can have. Unknowingly, this decision created an environment in which .su became the digital Wild West. Today it is a barely protected top-level domain, an informal home for Russian dark operations, and a haven for supremacist content and cybercrime. (translator’s note – in fact, in Russia .su is the most common domain, existing along with .ru and .рф).

A few years later, in 1992, IANA learned a similar harsh lesson at the end of the Balkan War, which led to the breakup of Yugoslavia into several smaller states. After this, the state union of Serbia and Montenegro tried to adopt the name “Federal Republic of Yugoslavia”. Slovenia and Croatia objected, arguing that this implied that Serbia and Montenegro were the legal successors to Yugoslavia. Both countries filed a protest with the UN.

While the international question about the name of Serbia and Montenegro rumbled in the early nineties, IANA was not sure who should control .yu, Yugoslavia's top-level domain. Access to email and the Internet are now integral to research and international debate, and IANA ambiguity has led to an extraordinary act of academic espionage.

According to journalist Kaloyan Kolev Slovenian scientists went to Serbia at the end of 1992. Their destination was the University of Belgrade in the country's capital. Upon arrival, they hacked into the university and stole all the hosting software and domain records for the .yu top-level domain – everything they needed to seize control. For the next two years, the .yu domain was unofficially managed by ARNES (Academic and Research Network of Slovenia), which repeatedly denied any involvement in the original heist. ARNES rejected all requests from Serbian institutions for new domains, severely limiting the country's ability to participate in the growing Internet community. The situation became so messy that in 1994, IANA founding manager Jon Postel personally intervened and overturned the IANA rules, forcing ownership of the .yu domain back to the University of Belgrade.

In 2006, Montenegro declared its independence from Serbia. With the onset of the digital revolution, IANA was determined to prevent chaos from reigning again. It created two new top-level domains: .rs for Serbia and .me for Montenegro. Both were released demanding that .yu be officially discontinued. It didn't happen until 2010, but IANA eventually got its way. Burned by this experience, the organization established a new, stricter set of rules and expiration dates for top-level domains that still exist today.

These are the rules that will soon apply to the .io domain. They are firm and clear. Once the country code ceases to exist, the domain should also cease to exist, ideally within three to five years. Just as a tenant is told that their landlord has put their house up for sale and they must move, every person and company that uses the .io domain will be told the same thing.

Endurance physical history

.io has become popular among startups, especially those involved in cryptocurrency . These are businesses that often identify with one of the original principles of the Internet – cyberspace provides form of independence to those who use it. However, it is the long tail of real-world history that may force them to make major changes.

IANA could rig its own rules and allow .io to continue to exist. Money is everything, and there's a lot of it tied up in .io domains. However, the history of the USSR and Yugoslavia is still looming in the air, and IANA may feel that careless play with top-level domains will only come back to bite it.

Whatever happens, the warning to future tech founders is clear: be careful when choosing a top-level domain. Physical history has never been as separate from our digital future as we like to think.