The Disappearance of an Internet Domain
every.to
How geopolitics can alter digital infrastructure
  • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    71·
    2 months ago

    the warning for future tech founders is clear: Be careful when picking your top-level domain. Physical history is never as separate from our digital future as we like to think.

    Kinda ironic this is published to a website with a .to ccTLD for the Kingdom of Tonga.

    • lostinfog@reddthat.comEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      My former company had a .bb domain for internal services because it rhymed with the name. We had constant outages whenever a storm was hitting Barbados…

      • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        Interesting, that’s not something I ever thought about. I just looked up the nameservers for .bb:

        ;; ANSWER SECTION:
bb.			86400	IN	NS	ns5.nic.bb.
bb.			86400	IN	NS	ns3.nic.bb.
bb.			86400	IN	NS	ns2.nic.bb.
bb.			86400	IN	NS	ns1.nic.bb.
bb.			86400	IN	NS	ns4.nic.bb.
bb.			86400	IN	NS	ns6.nic.bb.

        It seems like ns1.nic.bb doesn’t resolve, and for 2-6, they’re all in either 64.68.192.0/20 or 64.119.192.0/20, so it does look like a small concentration in root nameservers which could be unavailable in a storm.

        • lostinfog@reddthat.comEnglish
          4·
          2 months ago

          Some times someone’s clever joke can have unforeseen consequences. There must be a razor for that. Or at least a xkcd comic.

  • Lime Buzz@beehaw.orgEnglish
    30·
    2 months ago

    Kind of good in a way. It was always colonialism for tech companies to be using it anyway, when it wasn’t meant for them.

    • anarchrist@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      25·
      2 months 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.

      • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
        10·
        2 months 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.

      • abbadon420@lemm.ee
        4·
        2 months ago

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

        • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
          17·
          2 months 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 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.

          There’s more subdomains than just .co as well and both wikipedia articles I linked list them.

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

          • blindsight@beehaw.org
            2·
            2 months 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.)

            • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
              5·
              2 months ago

              I didn’t know about Canada and after thinking about it for a minute the United States does something similar for the States with .gov. Many, if not all, States have their own subdomain such as wyo.gov, montana.gov, and nebraska.gov.

              Honestly it’s always seemed wrong and somewhat confusing that non-country specific TLDs, such as .gov, are dedicated to the United States.

    • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
      9·
      2 months 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”.

      edit: I’m reading elsewhere that it’s not yet decided for sure whether to kill the TLD, but no one seems to think it will be given to the Chagossians, unfortunately.

      • sanzky@beehaw.org
        2·
        2 months ago

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

        • quant@leminal.spaceEnglish
          4·
          2 months ago

          Two letters TLD like .io are ISO country codes. Catalonia’s .cat is a generic TLD in comparison. Since .io stands for the British Indian Ocean Territory and Chagos Island isn’t going to be ‘separate’ 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.

          • sanzky@beehaw.org
            2·
            2 months ago

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

        • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
          2·
          2 months 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.

    • fine_sandy_bottom@lemmy.federate.cc
      7·
      2 months ago

      I don’t really know anything about Chagos, but is that really what the islanders want? A quick google suggests the islanders might find it difficult to agree.

      Most micro island nations just aren’t viable as a sovereign nation in 2024. They need air travel, health services, telecommunications, building materials, food imports, education, et cetera. Sadly they just aren’t able to produce anything of any value with which to pay for all of those things.

      In many cases they end up trading their sovereignty for political positions. It looks like there’s already a detention centre for sri lankans in Chagos. China will happily pay then millions a year for them not to recognise Taiwan as a sovereign state, which is kinda ironic.

      Nauru is a fairly interesting island nation. They sold the rights to their phosphate (bird poo) 80 (?) some years ago, and after it was extracted they were left with a moon scape. Sadly they squandered the money with some comically bad investments, including a broadway production IIRC. Health outcomes are pretty terrible.

      It looks like there’s already a military base in Chagos, so I guess that’s something they can trade on.

      Another problem with sovereignty is migration rights. If you’re born somewhere like that you would absolutely want the opportunity to go to university in Australia or UK or similar.

        • fine_sandy_bottom@lemmy.federate.cc
          3·
          2 months ago

          Yes. I think it would be hard to find anyone who thinks chagossians should not be consulted in determining what happens with their island.

          The stark reality is that it’s probably just not possible, in any meaningful way.

          I have first hand experience in this type of negotiation with community / minority group trying to navigate the best outcomes for them with their limited resources, although of course nothing so dramatic as deciding what to do with an island.

          The first problem you encounter is that their is very limited governance within the group, or no governance, or extraordinarily poor governance which is acting against the best interests of the group. Straight off the bat you can end up mediating internal disputes which might be generational feuds. For chagossians, you might ask who gets consulted and are they reasonable representatives of the group.

          The next problem you encounter is that the demands of the group may very likely be unreasonable and unachievable, and the group might become hostile if they are unmet. For example you might think possible outcomes in this circumstances are stay with UK, join Mauritius, or become a sovereign nation. What happens if the group demands a fourth option, a new island, in the mid latitudes, unpopulated, potential for local fishing industry, et cetera. You can’t really negotiate with a group that would make such a demand.

          Another problem is that, well, the stark reality is that maybe the Chagossians don’t really have any meaningful options. What’s the point of negotiating if the only potential outcome is being subsumed by Mauritius and accepting whatever they will provide.

          In addition, no matter how much you consult with them, there will always be someone that says they weren’t consulted and they’re bitter because they didn’t receive their new tropical island.

          Finally, if things need to be resolved in a timely manner, then involving the Chagossians isn’t going to achieve that. The only option is to hand them over to Mauritius and let them manage all of these issues that have been simmering away since the dawn of time.

  • warm@kbin.earth
    15·
    2 months ago

    Or more likely, they will just move the domain to be a generic TLD instead of a country code TLD, due to it’s popularity in the tech space.

    • LostXOR@fedia.io
      5·
      2 months ago

      Can they do that? I thought all two letter TLDs were reserved for ccTLDs only. It’ll be interesting to see how things play out.

      • ⓝⓞ🅞🅝🅔@lemmy.ca
        12·
        2 months ago

        Perhaps not an actual reclassification since, until now, all two letter TLDs have been exclusively for countries. But for the right price, I imagine convincing them to maintain the two character TLD… for “posterity” … and… “backwards compatibility”…

        coughs, clears throat, and pushes 💰 across the table

        …would make sense.

        😏

  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
    10·
    2 months ago

    For people who haven’t been following this story, the Chagos islanders don’t want companies to stop using the .io domain, they want to receive the registration fees, which is much more important to them than having the TLD go away.

    Unfortunately, because the territory is going to Mauritius instead of to the Chagos islanders, IANA is killing the TLD entirely (since Mauritius already has their own country TLD).