Comment on The British government is transferring sovereignty of an island in the Indian Ocean to Mauritius next week, potentially impacting the existence of the .io domain.

SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• anarchrist@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I mean IANA or whatever literally made up a standard where two letter TLDs were reserved for countries even if they aren’t how those countries refer to themselves, see gr for Greece. I’m assuming .io just stands for Indian Ocean in this case, which seems like probably not how the chagosans self identify. Then you have countries like Montenegro that have .me and realized it means something in English so capitalized on it by licensing a company to resell .me domains.

  I don’t think I have any particular point other than I think it’s dumb to have a system of artificial scarcity be the only alternative to having to remember the IP of every damn site I want to use.

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  • Buelldozer@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I’m assuming .io just stands for Indian Ocean in this case

    British Indian Ocean Territory, it was just shortened to .io so it would fit into the naming scheme.

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  • abbadon420@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    If IANA has all two letter domains reserved for countries, than why is there no .uk?

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    • Buelldozer@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      That’s a great question and the answer can be found in the wikipedia entry for the .uk domain.

      In a nutshell the volunteer “Naming Committee” setup back in 1985 established a rule that that entities needed to register into specific subdomains based on entity type such as .co, where the .co part stood for “Company”. They did this to make managing registrations easier and to provide an “at a glance” way to see what kind of website you were visiting (commercial, government, charity, etc). The “Naming Committee” was extremely strict about ensuring that domains were registered to a specific entity and in the correct subdomain.

      By the mid-90s the volunteer “Naming Committee” was entirely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of domains being registered so that volunteer group was replaced by Nominet UK. Nominet didn’t open the .uk TLD to registration until 2014 and by then the subdomain thing (.co.uk) was so embedded into the United Kingdom’s internet structure that it had become tradition and NOT using was confusing to many people.

      You can find a list of the subdomains managed by Nominet here.

      tl;dr .uk absolutely exists in the UK, it’s just used differently than almost anywhere else in the world.

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      • blindsight@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Canada uses gc.ca for federal government sites, and I think every province gets their own, too, like .bc.ca (but I don’t know if they all use them.)

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    • SapientLasagna@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      There is: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk

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    • smeg@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      There’s no .uk and there never was!

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      • apotheotic@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        looks at your instance domain

        Carry on

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    • HatchetHaro@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      i’ve seen a lot of .uk sites around

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• t3rmit3@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Unfortunately the IANA decided to kill the TLD altogether, but the Chagos islanders have been asking to get control of it themselves so they can receive the registration fees. This was sort of the worst of both worlds: they could have given the Chagos islands it’s own TLD, or given control of .io to the Chagos islanders, but instead they just said, “you’re not sovereign, so you get nothing”.

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  • sanzky@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I don’t get why they killed. some regional areas have their own TLD. .cat for Catalonia, for example.

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    • quant@leminal.space ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Two letters TLD like .io are ISO country codes. Catalonia’s .cat is a generic TLD in comparison. Since .io stands for the “Indian Ocean” and Chagos Island isn’t going to be ‘sovereign’ anymore by becoming part of Mauritius, IANA’s logic is that the ccTLD has to be retired. That .su is still around after the collapse of USSR isn’t a valid argument for them.

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      • sanzky@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        ok. I was not aware the two letter TLD were more restricted than the others. thanks!

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    • t3rmit3@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Technically, they haven’t yet. In the past they’ve sometimes transitioned ownership of country-code TLDs over (like the Soviet Union’s .su to Russia). I think they just don’t want to wade into the debate over the Chagos Islands in general.

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