This story really got my blood boiling. CW: involves a forced expulsion of people
TL;DR
.io represents the British Indian Ocean Territory 🇮🇴, which is basically a joint UK/US military base as a state. It was formed after natives were forcefully evicted off of those islands to construct it.
While this is an interesting read, this doesn’t appear to be the case:
Every .io domain you buy funds a government committing crimes against humanity.
The .io TLD wikipedia article claims that it has always been operated by private entities and no revenue is shared with the United Kingdom
A little more nuanced than that, at the bottom of the article it says:
According to a 2014 Gigaom interview with Paul Kane, then chairman of the Internet Computer Bureau, the domain name registry is required to give some of its profits to the British government, for administration of the British Indian Ocean Territory.[23] After being questioned as a result of the interview, the British Government denied receiving any funds from the sale of .io domain names, and argued that consequently, the profits could not be shared with the Chagossians, the former inhabitants forcibly removed by the British government.[24] Kane, however, contradicted the government’s denial.[25][26]
A bit too exaggerated I might say… There are many things in this world that fund institutions that may be less ethical in their practices. But to write 10 pages about such a small thing I’d say is too much. We have more important things to worry about rn. I’ll keep this in mind when buying a domain? But is that the solution…
Good grief.
Like reading 10 pages that Milkshake duck is racist.
Agreed that it could use an executive summary, but I appreciated driving in to the history.
I find it funny how King Charles III is King of so many vanity domains. .gg? Guernsey. .io? Indian Ocean Territory, a UK overseas territory. .TV? Tuvalu, a commonwealth realm.
agar.io in shambles
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What is also sad here is that this is not news. I remember reading a story about this at least 3 years ago. All those cool tech websites are just handng money over, sometimes knowingly.
I have a similar story, not well known as well… but yeah, this is close to home.
Is CW the same as TW (trigger warning)? If so, what does the C stand for?
I believe it’s content warning
Ah, thank you.
