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The UK government has signed a treaty handing over sovereignty of the Chagos archipelago to Mauritius, which could eventually turn out to be bad news for .io domain name owners.<\/strong><\/p>\n Currently known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, Chagos was seized in the 1960s and 1970s, its citizens deported, and is home to a strategically important UK-US military base.<\/p>\n The new treaty (pdf)<\/a> is not of course interested in issues as small-beer as ownership of ccTLDs \u2014 it\u2019s much more concerned with the control of spectrum critical to running the base \u2014 but there are some elements of the text that may be cause for concern.<\/p>\n Who gets to talk to the UN on behalf of the islands is important because of how country names and the codes used for ccTLDs are assigned.<\/p>\n The Statistics Division of the United Nations Secretariat publishes a standard known as M49, \u201cStandard Country or Area Codes for Statistical Use\u201d. That\u2019s where ccTLD codes first appear.<\/p>\n That list is used by the International Organization for Standardization when it builds its ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 list, which is in turn used by ICANN\/IANA to decide which territories qualify for a ccTLD and what the ccTLD is.<\/p>\n If Chagos is no longer recognised by the UN as a separate territory for statistical purposes, that would set a chain of events in motion that would see .io removed from the DNS root in five to 10 years.<\/p>\n If Chagos retains its place on the various lists, and Mauritius changes not only the name but the two-letter code, that would see .io retired and replaced with the ccTLD matching the new code, again in five to 10 years.<\/p>\n Or Mauritius could change the name, but not the code, meaning .io registrants would be safe. The ccTLD is believed to have over a million registrations and is popular with tech companies as a domain hack for I\/O or input\/output.<\/p>\n Identity Digital runs .io via a UK-based shell company it acquired several years ago. Perhaps sensing which way the wind was blowing, the company recently made a deal<\/a> to become the back-end registry operator for .mu, the Mauritian ccTLD, so it has a foot in the door in the country.<\/p>\n If you find this post or this blog useful or interestjng, please support Domain Incite<\/a>, the independent source of news, analysis and opinion for the domain name industry and ICANN community.<\/b>\n<\/p>\n \n\t\tTweet<\/a><\/p>\n\n
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