“Show them a map of the world; most of them have a job finding the Isle of Wight.” Sir Humphrey Appleby’s astute observation about the state of politicians in Yes Minister continues to hold true as Britain has agreed to hand over the Chagos Islands, a necklace of tropical islands in the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius. While politicians reach out for a map to point out the islands, backroom staff has to deal with a financially-lucrative issue — what happens to the .io domain?
Decades ago, the tropical archipelago just south of the equator off the tip of India, was given the IO country code and was allocated — by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) — a matching .io (Indian Ocean) country code domain in 1997. For example, India has .in, for the UK it’s .uk and for the US, it’s .us. The British government allowed the rights to sell .io domains to the Internet Computer Bureau (ICB) several years ago (the company was sold in 2017, reportedly for $70 million, and has been bought again since then).
The .io domain name has become popular among supporters of the digital economy as the initials stand for input/output or the process of sending and receiving data. Many cryptocurrency companies selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) also use .io web addresses. So it could be an expensive domain name.
Usually, a country’s government receives revenue for any site that registers using their country code domain. Take the case of Anguilla, a British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean known for its coral reefs and white sand beaches. It has the lucrative domain name .ai that many artificial intelligence startups use, like Stability.ai and Elon Musk’s X.ai. Anguilla reportedly earned $25-$30 million in domain-registration fees for 2023.
The price of a .ai domain can vary, just like it does with a .com but registrars like GoDaddy and NameCheap have to pay a fixed price to Anguilla. Similar rules apply to the .io domain name, popular examples of it being itch.io and opensea.io.
Entrepreneur Paul Kane, who previously led ICB, told GigaOm years ago that the British government collected some of the revenue from the sale of .io domains, which the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office refuted. In 2020, the Chagossians submitted a claim to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights to say they are the rightful owners of .io and said it was a $50 million digital property.
Since Mauritius obtained independence from Britain in 1968, the country has claimed sovereignty over the islands but Britain, which designated the islands as the British Indian Ocean Territory, disputed such claims. Chagossians were not allowed to return to their homes. Diego Garcia, the largest island of the Chagos Archipelago, was leased out to the US for a military base (Britain and the US will continue to operate the military base). In 2019 the International Court of Justice, the UN’s highest court, ruled that British occupation of the islands was illegal.
Complicating the matter is the UK’s agreement: The British Indian Ocean Territory will be no more, so what is the future of the .io domain? IANA has a process of retiring old country codes within five years (unless there are extensions), so the .su domain of the Soviet Union stayed on for sometime even after its collapse, and the same goes for Yugoslavia’s .yu. Only time would tell whether the .io domain name turns out to be a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
