A deal signed by the UK could bring about the end of the .io domain. Last week, the British government announced that it had agreed to give up ownership of the Chagos Islands, a territory in the Indian Ocean that it has controlled since 1814, and with it the .io domain.
But first let's take a step back (and I mean far back) to see how we got here. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Chagos Islands were settled in the 18th century by the French, who brought slaves to the archipelago. In 1814, the French ceded control of the Chagos Islands and the island nation of Mauritius to the British. When the British took power, the Chagos Islands remained a dependency of Mauritius.
In 1965, the United Kingdom granted Mauritius its sovereignty, but the government decided to split off the Chagos Islands and make them part of the British Indian Ocean Territory. The United Kingdom eventually forcibly displaced the Chagossian people so that the United States could establish a military base on one of the islands, displacing more than 1,500 people, as detailed in this Human Rights Watch report.
Eventually, the Chagos Islands – or the British Indian Ocean Territory – received the country code IO. It was also assigned a corresponding .io country code domain in 1997. According to a 2014 report by GigaOm, the British government granted the Internet Computer Bureau (ICB) the rights to sell .io domains.
Normally, a country's government is supposed to receive revenue for all websites that register using its country code domain. Anguilla, for example, which has the country code AI, was reported to earn between $25 million and $30 million last year from registering websites with the .ai domain.
The IANA's goal is to remove old country code domains from circulation within five years
One would think that the Chagos Islands would make a similar amount of money with the .io domain. Eventually, thousands of vibrant tech startups and cryptocurrency companies – like itch.io, Greenhouse.io and opensea.io – adopted the domain, as “io” also serves as an abbreviation for “input/output.”
However, entrepreneur Paul Kane, who previously headed the ICB, told GigaOm that the British government collected part of the proceeds, which came as a surprise to the Chagossian people. In 2020, the Chagossians filed a lawsuit to acquire ownership of a reportedly $50 million estate, as reported by Assets.
But now the UK's final deal will make the Chagos Islands part of Mauritius – a move that Chagossians say the government didn't even consult them about. With this change, the British Indian Ocean Territory no longer exists, putting the future of the .io domain in question.
As highlighted by the Everyone Newsletter, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has a process for removing old country code domains within five years (with the possibility of extensions). IANA introduced this rule after the Soviet Union's .su domain persisted after its collapse and became a domain commonly used by cybercriminals.
Since then, IANA has also had to retire the .yu domain previously used for Yugoslavia, but it remained in operation for years after the country's disintegration while government websites were converted to new domains. And although the independent Solomon Islands has the domain name .sb, where “B” represents that it was formerly a British protectorate, this domain was not registered until decades after its independence. The UK still has the inactive .gb domain, but is considering phasing it out.
At the moment, it is too early to say what will become of the .io domain – whether it will undergo a similar transition period as .yu or whether IANA will simply hand it over to the Chagossans. The edge reached out to Identity Digital – the domain registrar that had previously won the rights to sell .io domains – and IANA for information about the future of .io. We did not immediately receive a response.