

The dark side of .io - zactral
https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how-the-u-k-is-making-web-domain-profits-from-a-shady-cold-war-land-deal/

======
mrfrisby
This thread is a depressingly self-serving reflection of this community. Few
of you seem to have bothered to do anything but skim the article and come to a
snap judgement based on what seems to be your idealised notion of how TLDs
should be managed.

For the sake of my own sanity, lets just be clear here:

1\. An island chain was forcibly depopulated in order for the largest land
mass to be leased to the United States as a strategically important military
base away from outside observers which has since been used as a staging post
for the renditions of people to illegal prisons on US sovereign territory.

2\. The former inhabitants of the Island are prevented from returning thanks
to a tricky piece of political gamesmanship which classfieid the island chain
as a marine park unable to sustain human population, whilst at the same time
permitting the construction and continuous growth of one of the United States
largest overseas military bases.

3\. The Chagossians - now living in slums in Mauritius - or even worse - Kent,
have limited access to education, die younger than they ought to, and are
prevented from prospering in exile thanks to their ill treatment at the hands
of the Mauritian government, the same government paid to help Britain pave the
way for the above heinous acts.

4\. The natural resources of the islands, the land, the sea, the soil, the
strategically important geographic position, the TLD, the international
dialling code, the airspace - all of this was stolen when the people were
forcibly removed. You may discuss the merits of TLD sovereignty somewhere
else, this is not the issue at hand here. If Britain can sell and profit from
.uk domain names, the Chagossians deserve that same right as equals.

This is not about a TLD, it is about the abhorrent treatment of a small nation
at the hands of a large one. It is the grossest example of the same kind of
tawdry crap which colonial powers of past and present have gotten away with
for centuries. Your ignorance and self-serving positions are staggering,
disappointing, and completely unsurprising.

~~~
frozenport
I don't find it pragmatic to revise history, I don't believe the Native
Americans should get _.us_

~~~
chrislgrigg
This situation doesn't really seem like it's "history" in the same sense,
considering it happened so recently, governments are still actively working
against them as they attempt repatriation, and the TLD issue is fresh.

~~~
PythonicAlpha
I see some parallels, and time that has passed by is also a weak excuse. Even
I think, that many native Americans also still suffer from the treatment their
ancestors got.

But: You can't excuse one wrong with another wrong. The fight about the TLDs
might be some little thing, but what happened to those people is an outspoken
injustice and I can't comprehend, how modern countries could do such things in
the last decades.

The comparison to native Americans is good, because it shows, that the methods
are still the same, the deeds are just hidden better nowadays.

~~~
chrislgrigg
No, time that has passed is not a weak excuse if we are discussing something
that is current and loosely involves many of us (the purchase of .io TLDs, an
issue that only emerged recently) instead of having a general discussion about
government abuses over time.

Nobody is trying to say that Native Americans didn't get a raw deal; only one
person is trying to say that because Native Americans got a raw deal a few
hundred years ago, it's OK to do the same to the Chagossians right now. This
is the sort of logic people always employ when they're trying to feel better
about participating in something shitty. It's the "But he hit me first!" of
ethics.

------
lsiebert
Ugh... So the British Colonial Chief, in 1966, wrote “Unfortunately along with
the birds go some few Tarzans or Man Fridays whose origins are obscure and who
are hopefully being wished on to Mauritius.”

And from the Wikileaks cable:

'He asserted that establishing a marine park would, in effect, put paid to
resettlement claims of the archipelago's former residents. Responding to
Polcouns' observation that the advocates of Chagossian resettlement continue
to vigorously press their case, Roberts opined that the UK's "environmental
lobby is far more powerful than the Chagossians' advocates." '

That's just ugly and wrong.

------
jessaustin
_The British High Court ruled in 2000 that they could do so, but the
government ordered the ruling overturned..._

Haha I can think of a few leaders of other nations who might enjoy this power.

Of course I have sympathy for refugees of all sorts. However, although the
Chagossians were definitely screwed out of their home, it doesn't follow that
they have been screwed out of ".io" money. It is an accident of history that
TLDs are relatively scarce, that national governments may extract economic
rents from TLDs, that some ccTLDs have no corresponding national government,
and that the UK happens to own ".io". Nothing any Chagossian ever did entitles
her or her descendants to this money.

In a better world than ours, there would be billions of TLDs, and the value of
any one of them would be negligible.

~~~
13
We already have thousands of top level domains and it's utterly ridiculous.
People with trademarks have an obligation to protect their mark or risk losing
it. Depending how you read that, it can involve buying hundreds of different
variations on your brand name under different top levels. Some of them even
appear to be trying to capitalize on brand protection behavior; companies will
feel compelled to purchase .gripe for example to stop it hosting negative
content about them.

    
    
        $ whois apple.gripe
    
        Registrant Organization: Apple Inc.
        Registrant Email: domains@apple.com
    

See?

~~~
jessaustin
IANAL, and I'm not responsible for poor legal advice that I haven't even
given. The elimination of stupid corporate lawyer bullshit like this would be
but one of the benefits of a non-scarce TLD regime. If keeping a trademark
required spending many billions of dollars every year, either firms would make
do without trademark, or the law would recognize that "apple.gripe" doesn't
mean anything about Apple Computer's trademarks.

~~~
smt88
Trademarks are useful. They let you know that you're buying from the person
you intend to buy from.

Imagine a world without trademarks. The US would be flooded with iPhone
knockoffs, and all of them would be identical to iPhones. They'd have god-
knows-what inside them, but they'd bear the Apple logo.

Or, imagine you want to pay your American Express bill. Unfortunately, someone
has bought AmericanExpress.card, and you get confused. You end up inputting
your AmEx login info into a phishing site and give a hacker your personal
data.

In a world without trademarks, Apple and American Express wouldn't have the
legal authority to pursue people that are imitating them.

~~~
jessaustin
A) Of course trademark is valuable (to important parties!), that is the
premise of the grandparent comment. (So the "...firms would make do without
trademark..." clause is a deliberate absurdity.)

B) This anti-phishing idea is security theater. If you teach cardholders that
a URL will save them from getting phished, they'll get phished. This is
analogous to, though quite a bit worse than, the idea that a logo guarantees
authenticity, even in our current regime. (E.g., some of those who thought
they had purchased FTDI components were discovered recently to have not done.)

~~~
smt88
Re: A) You said either trademarks should go away or apple.gripe should become
acceptable. Definitely a false dichotomy, but my comment was targeted at
either/both of those possibilities.

Re: B) I completely disagree. I frequently visit mail.google.com, and I trust
that I'm not getting phished. I'm going purely on the basis of the URL there.
I wouldn't feel the same way going to, say, mail.google.me.

In order to trust a URL, you must be sure that your client system isn't
compromised (and nothing in between). If it is, you're vulnerable to much
worse than phishing. Phishing is likely unnecessary at that point.

It has nothing to do with the URL being secure or insecure. Using web-enabled
computers on a daily basis means that we're trusting our systems not to be
infected by unknown/undetected malware. We don't have any alternative, so we
take the risk.

There are many ways to be slightly more certain that our DNS records haven't
been tampered with nowadays, but we're still basically trusting hackable
systems all the time.

~~~
13
In a way short .com domains display some level of financial cost involved in
obtaining them. If I saw a website hosted on hexagon.com I'd assume it's
probably legitimate just due to the probable expensive of obtaining it being
higher than a phisher might be willing to pay.

------
russellbeattie
Sooo... what? This is easily the third or fourth time this has been linked to
in Hacker News. What relevance does it have to anything? Everyone who uses .io
domains are horrible, insensitive people? Those who use .me domains should be
forever ashamed of the various human rights violations of the Montenegrin
government in 1995? Anyone who uses bit.ly is basically insulting the victims
of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing? Etc. etc. It's just stupidity, and given the
vast numbers of gTLDs which are coming online every day, completely forgotten
about relatively shortly.

~~~
tarminian
First time I've seen it. I think it has a lot of relevance, we all need to
think more about the things we purchase. That chocolate bar you just ate was
probably produced using slave labor, those new cool shoes, made with sweat
shop labor by young girls. To just brush off articles like this is
insensitive.

~~~
sologoub
That's a bit of a straw man argument. If you read closely, the article says:
"The Chagossians are largely descended from African slaves brought to the
previously uninhabited islands, 2,200km (1,367 miles) north-east of Mauritius,
by the French in the 18th century."

Yes, these unfortunate souls have suffered generations of evil, starting with
the slave trade and finish off with being expelled from the island(s). That
said, I don't really see the argument that it is somehow their land. Should
they have been properly compensated or better yet relocated somewhere with
better conditions than what they had? Absolutely! In fact, it seems that a law
suite seeking that compensation might have better luck than trying to reclaim
the land.

The example used earlier with the Balkans is so much more complicated.
Depending on who's side of history you take, all sides have a claim to most of
the land in the Balkans. Things seem to be much more clear cut here.

~~~
thizzbuzz
> That said, I don't really see the argument that it is somehow their land.

I don't see a good argument that any land belongs to any person on earth. That
said, subsisting off a single piece of land for 250 years is a much better
claim than "we want this for economic/military development". I also tend not
to side with the party that gasses 1000 pet dogs as part of their forced
relocation process.

~~~
sologoub
Got a citation for that dog figure?

~~~
thizzbuzz
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Greatbatch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Greatbatch)

[http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/18/the-story-of-the-
chag...](http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/18/the-story-of-the-chagos-
islands-and-its-people/)

 _About 1,000 pet dogs were taken – some straight from screaming children –
and gassed with exhaust fumes from American military vehicles._

------
jahewson
There's an obvious flaw in this argument. The .io domain is a British
invention, it only exists _because_ of the decision to separate the islands
from Mauritius. Had the US not wanted a military base, then the Chagos Islands
would be part of Mauritius and have a .mu domain.

Had history unfolded as the OP wanted then .io would simply not exist.
Alternatively, if the islands were to become independent in the future then
they would no longer be the British Indian Ocean Territory, by definition, and
likewise have no logical claim on (or even need for) the .io domain.

It's easy to feel sorry for these people, but it's hard to see how they have a
claim on something which was never theirs and is an administrative construct
of a territory which they never lived in, which would ultimately be abolished
in some future ideal world.

Given the article's many complaints about the U.S. military and the CIA, I
can't help thinking that the OP might have a more compelling case for
boycotting .com domains.

------
jordanpg
It is surreal reading this. The geographic connections between ccTLDs and
their associated 2-letter pairs with their English connotations are
_completely arbitrary_. ICANN could have just as easily decided to issue all
26*26 two-letter TLDs according to some other scheme.

~~~
geographomics
It's not completely arbitrary, it's mostly based on ISO 3166 which is in turn
derived from the names of countries. So on the contrary, it was a very
deliberate assignment of two letter codes to territories.

If the islanders had not been forcibly displaced in the 1960s, they would most
probably have been had some say in the governance of .io, as other British
overseas territories have done for their respective domains.

~~~
dingaling
> it's mostly based on ISO 3166 which is in turn derived from the names of
> countries.

The _mostly_ is significant; in several cases the ISO was over-ridden and
arbitrary but sensible codes assigned e.g. UK instead of GB. Many smaller
territories were not granted codes in ISO3166 and had to be 'invented' for the
TLDs

ISO3166 is in itself a bit of a mess, and since it became used for TLDs there
have been dozens of requests for changes and additions based on new TLD
assignments.

~~~
M2Ys4U
.uk was the first ccTLD, and the assignment precedes the decision to use
ISO-3166

------
chrisfosterelli
While the actual story is a terrible human rights violation, I don't see how
this is related to .IO domains in the least.

I think most people that purchase/visit an .IO domain have little idea what
geological place is tied to it. It sounds like the money goes to the British
government to use as they see fit, and I doubt many people would have a
problem with that in the first place if it wasn't in this unfortunate
geopolitcal context.

~~~
stefantalpalaru
See no evil, hear no evil?

------
majc2
John Pilger's "Stealing a Nation" documentary goes into the Chagos Islands in
quite a lot of detail:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zhGvId4fcc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zhGvId4fcc)

~~~
kiliancs
Thanks! I also recommend it.

------
jim_dnaley
Good article - the control of the infrastructure of the internet is a large
problem today. For historical context, I suggest looking into Paul Garrin's
project Name.Space - it highlights the often-invisible control of TLDs and
DNSs by companies close to their respective governments (often granted sole
control over their market). Although Name.Space was more pertinent while
Network Solutions still held a monopoly over domain registration, it seems
like the same kind of problem continues today.

About Name.Space:
[http://namespace.us/about.php](http://namespace.us/about.php)

A good interview of Paul Garrin can be found here:
[http://www.nettime.org/Lists-
Archives/nettime-l-9805/msg0005...](http://www.nettime.org/Lists-
Archives/nettime-l-9805/msg00058.html)

------
chrislgrigg
If nothing else, it would be nice if learning about this inspired those who
own .io domains to contribute to a fund for the Chagossian people. I'd
certainly match the $60 I paid to register my domain to a support organization
if I could find one that looked legit.

------
hansjorg
Interestingly, the UK cabinet and parliament had no official hand in the
actual decision to expel.

When the US requested the forced expulsion of the Chagossians, the Queen could
act unilaterally since she is still the direct ruler of the British Indian
Ocean Territory.

~~~
jlangenauer
I would be extremely shocked if this was actually the case. Do you have any
source for this claim?

~~~
hansjorg
I might me misremembering it, but I think this was told in the documentary
Stealing a Nation [1].

According to Wikipedia, there is a commissioner with the Foreign Office that
acts as administrator, but that commissioner is directly appointed by the
Queen [2].

1)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing_a_Nation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing_a_Nation)

2)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_the_British_India...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_the_British_Indian_Ocean_Territory)

~~~
M2Ys4U
>directly appointed by the Queen

While this may be _technically_ true, the monarch's powers (the royal
prerogatives[0]) are almost exclusively exercised on the advice of the prime
minister/cabinet.

In other words, while the power officially rests with the Queen, the UK
government is the one to wield it in practice.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_prerogative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_prerogative)

------
iLoch
Perhaps a good starting point would be allowing me to sign a petition when I
order a .io domain. Obviously this would require action by large domain
providers, but it would be a good way to raise awareness I think.

------
kiliancs
It's very sad to see more examples of nations with power taking advantage of
smaller nations, but I'm aware there are more cases than we'll probably be
able to find out about. To me cases such as this one should be resolved based
on universal principles that are sadly ignored, such as that all nations
should treat each other as equal and see themselves as parts of a greater
community whose best interest should be always a priority. Justice can only be
made if it's based on solid principles.

------
donmb
I don't own a .io domain although thought about it several times. At least now
I know I will not buy one. Thanks HN.

------
kijin
Okay, this is going to be controversial, but I have no problem whatsoever with
moving people around like this, as long as: 1) the displaced people are
adequately compensated for their loss, and 2) they are given freedom to move
to a place where they can enjoy human rights and make an adequate living.

The right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates is not a human right.

This applies at every scale from a single building demolished to make way for
a highway, to an entire country's worth of refugees.

So the big problem is not that Britain evicted the Chagossians and is refusing
to let them back. That was just a case of eminent domain. The problem is that
Britain and Mauritius never properly compensated them and didn't ensure that
they could make a living in their new home.

If redistributing the profits from .io to these people would make goddess of
justice smile, fine, let's do it. But enough with the "it's my ancestral
home!" bullshit.

As the article mentions, the Chagossians weren't even the "native" or
"original" population of the islands. The French had enslaved them and brought
them there by force, and the rest were migrant workers from India. None of
them had any right to claim those islands as their home, except that they
happened to live there at the time when Britain decided to vacate the islands.

In fact, none of us have any right to claim any piece of real estate as our
own. The law, of course, grants certain people certain rights with respect to
land, for the sake of convenience and economic efficiency. But morally, it's
all arbitrary. Why does it matter whether someone has lived on a piece of land
for three generations or three hundred? What about nomadic peoples who claim a
large swath of land but only use parts of it sporadically? Besides, virtually
all habitable land on Earth has been conquered multiple times by different
groups of people, all of whom might have some sort of claim on that land.

Whenever we hear about some group of people who complain that their house,
village, country, etc. was taken from them, the location in question rarely
has anything more than sentimental value for the oldest members of that group.
What really matters are human rights (e.g. right to participate in the
governance of whatever territory they happen to live in) and the ability to
make a stable living. Without those, returning the land to them won't make
their circumstances any better. Nostalgia doesn't put food on your table. On
the other hand, once you have rights and a stable occupation, over time you
learn to stop fussing about your location.

The idea that some people have some sort of god-given right to occupy some
specific geographic coordinates has caused so much bloodshed, unnecessary
grief, and opportunity for ideologues to take advantage of innocent people
throughout human history. Can't we just stop doing that already?

~~~
philsnow
> the displaced people are adequately compensated for their loss

How can you measure (in order to attempt to "adequately compensate" displaced
people) the inability to live in one's ancestral homeland? Imagine if we were
all shipped to a somewhat earth-like moon somewhere, under "eminent domain".

~~~
roywiggins
"As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying
regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route
through your star system. And regrettably, your planet is one of those
scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your
Earth minutes. Thank you."

------
notastartup
I picked up [http://getleads.io](http://getleads.io) for only $40, it was
ridiculously easier than I thought because somehow I remembered .io domains as
being expensive. Seems like the competition has brought down the prices quite
a bit in the past few years.

~~~
ceejayoz
$40 _is_ expensive for a domain.

~~~
bbcbasic
yes .bit is much cheaper!

