DALL-E/Every illustration.

The Disappearance of an Internet Domain

How geopolitics can alter digital infrastructure

390 11

Today we have something a little different from Gareth Edwards, who typically chronicles the forgotten history of Silicon Valley in his column, The Crazy Ones. When the British government announced last week that it was transferring sovereignty of an island in the Indian Ocean to the country of Mauritius, Gareth immediately realized its online implications: the end of the .io domain suffix. In this piece, he explores how geopolitical changes can unexpectedly disrupt the digital world. His exploration of historical precedents—such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia—offers valuable context for tech founders, users, and observers. Read this for a look at the unexpected intersection of international relations and internet infrastructure.—Kate Lee

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.


On October 3, the British government announced that it was giving up sovereignty over a small tropical atoll in the Indian Ocean known as the Chagos Islands. The islands would be handed over to the neighboring island country of Mauritius, about 1,100 miles off the southeastern coast of Africa. 

The story did not make the tech press, but perhaps it should have. The decision to transfer the islands to their new owner will result in the loss of one of the tech and gaming industry’s preferred top-level domains: .io.

Whether it’s Github.io, gaming site itch.io, or even Google I/O (which arguably kicked off the trend in 2008), .io has been a constant presence in the tech lexicon. Its popularity is sometimes explained by how it represents the abbreviation for “input/output,” or the data received and processed by any system. What’s not often acknowledged is that it’s more than a quippy domain. It’s a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) related to a nation—meaning it involves politics far beyond the digital world.

Since 1968, the UK and U.S have operated a major military base on the Chagos Islands (officially known as the British Indian Ocean Territory) , but the neighboring nation of Mauritius has always disputed British sovereignty over them. The Mauritian government has long argued that the British illegally retained control when Mauritius gained independence. It has taken over 50 years, but that dispute has finally been resolved. In return for a 99-year lease for the military base, the islands will become part of Mauritius. 

Once this treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist. Various international bodies will update their records. In particular, the International Standard for Organization (ISO) will remove country code “IO” from its specification. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which creates and delegates top-level domains, uses this specification to determine which top-level country domains should exist. Once IO is removed, the IANA will refuse to allow any new registrations with a .io domain. It will also automatically begin the process of retiring existing ones. (There is no official count of the number of extant .io domains.)

Officially, .io—and countless websites—will disappear. At a time when domains can go for millions of dollars, it’s a shocking reminder that there are forces outside of the internet that still affect our digital lives.

When domains outlive countries

The removal of an entire country or territory from the world map is incredibly rare, so one might ask why the process for deleting a domain is so clearly documented. So automatic. So…final.

The answer is simple: history. 

There are two organizations responsible for domains and internet addresses. The IANA decides what should and shouldn’t be a top-level domain, such as .com, .org, .uk, or .nz. The organization originated at the University of Southern California, although it was only formalized in 1994, when it won a contract put out by the U.S. It operated for several years as a small research and management committee. As the internet grew, it became clear that a more formal setup was required. By 1998, the IANA became part of a new organization: the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN, based in the U.S., was given the broader responsibility of overseeing the operational stability of the internet and ensuring international interests were represented.

These two organizations might seem like they have mundane roles. But they have found themselves making some of the hardest decisions on the global internet.

On September 19, 1990, the IANA created and delegated the top-level domain .su to the USSR. Less than a year later, the USSR collapsed. At the time, nobody thought about what should happen with the .su domain—the internet as we know it was still years away. So the .su domain was handed to Russia to operate alongside its own (.ru). The Russian government agreed that it would eventually be shut down, but no clear rules around its governance or when that should happen were defined.

But ambiguity is the worst thing for a top-level domain. Unknowingly, this decision created an environment in which .su became a digital wild west. Today, it is a barely policed top-level domain, a plausibly deniable home for Russian dark ops and a place where supremacist content and cyber-crime have found cover.

A few years later, in 1992, the IANA learned a similarly harsh lesson at the end of the Balkans War, which saw the breakup of Yugoslavia into several smaller states. In its aftermath, the joint nation of Serbia and Montenegro attempted to adopt the name “Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.” Slovenia and Croatia objected, claiming that it implied Serbia and Montenegro were Yugoslavia’s legitimate successors. The two countries protested to the UN.

As the international issue over Serbia and Montenegro’s name rumbled on throughout the early nineties, the IANA remained unsure about who should control .yu, Yugoslavia’s top-level domain. Email access and the internet were now integral to research and international discussions, and the IANA’s ambiguity led to an extraordinary act of academic espionage.

According to the journalist Kaloyan Kolev, Slovenian academics traveled to Serbia at the end of 1992. Their destination was the University of Belgrade in the country’s capital. On arrival, they broke into the university and stole all the hosting software and domain records for the .yu top-level domain—everything they needed to seize control. For the next two years, the .yu domain was unofficially operated by ARNES (Academic and Research Network of Slovenia), which repeatedly denied its involvement in the original heist. ARNES rejected all requests by Serbian institutions for new domains, severely limiting the country’s ability to participate in the growing internet community. The situation became so messy that, in 1994, IANA founding manager Jon Postel personally stepped in and overrode IANA regulations, forcibly transferring ownership of the .yu domain back to the University of Belgrade.

In 2006, Montenegro declared independence from Serbia. With the digital revolution now firmly underway, the IANA was determined not to let chaos reign once again. It created two new top-level domains: .rs for Serbia and .me for Montenegro. Both were issued on the requirement that .yu would officially be terminated. It would take until 2010 for this to happen, but the IANA eventually got its way. Burned by the experience, the organization laid down the new, stricter set of rules and timescales for top-level domain expiration that exist today.

It’s these rules that will soon apply to the .io domain. They are firm, and they are clear. Once the country code no longer exists, the domain must cease to exist, too, ideally within three to five years. Like a tenant being told that their landlord is selling up and they must move, every individual and company who uses a .io domain will be told the same.

The endurance of physical history

.io has become popular with startups, particularly those involved in crypto. These are businesses that often identify with one of the original principles of the internet—that cyberspace grants a form of independence to those who use it. Yet it is the long tail of real-world history that might force on them a major change.

The IANA may fudge its own rules and allow .io to continue to exist. Money talks, and there is a lot of it tied up in .io domains. However, the history of the USSR and Yugoslavia still looms large, and the IANA may feel that playing fast and loose with top-level domains will only come back to haunt it.

Whatever happens, 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.


Gareth Edwards is a digital strategist, writer, and historian who has worked for startups and corporations in both the UK and U.S. He is an avid collector of old computers, rare books and interviews, and abandoned cats. Follow him on X, Mastodon, and BlueSky.

To read more essays like this, subscribe to Every, and follow us on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Berlin Wall fell in 1990, not 1989. We regret the error.

Find Out What
Comes Next in Tech.

Start your free trial.

New ideas to help you build the future—in your inbox, every day. Trusted by over 75,000 readers.

Subscribe

Already have an account? Sign in

What's included?

  • Unlimited access to our daily essays by Dan Shipper, Evan Armstrong, and a roster of the best tech writers on the internet
  • Full access to an archive of hundreds of in-depth articles
  • Unlimited software access to Spiral, Sparkle, and Lex

  • Priority access and subscriber-only discounts to courses, events, and more
  • Ad-free experience
  • Access to our Discord community

Comments

You need to login before you can comment.
Don't have an account? Sign up!

What a fascinating turn of events

brady Moritz 2 months ago

read on a .to domain...

Ryan B 2 months ago

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3552692/is-the-io-top-level-domain-headed-for-extinction.html has an initial comment from IANA, pretty non-committal. Not at all clear what they're going to do yet.

"..."there are multiple potential outcomes depending on the nature of the change...[one such change] may involve ensuring there is an operational nexus with Mauritius to meet certain policy requirements. Should .io no longer be retained as a coding for this territory, it could trigger a five-year retirement process..." ( https://www.iana.org/help/cctld-retirement )

Ashleigh Shepherd 2 months ago

I suspect there will be a bidding process at some point to let someone buy the rights to it as a gTLD. Whether we get a smooth handover between domain authorities will be another question entirely!

Gareth Edwards 2 months ago

@daemone That would actually cause more problems, as the current rules are that you can't have a two character gTLD. Those are reserved for ccTLDs to make sure there's a clear distinction.

I don't think you're far off the most likely outcome though: They'll give Mauritius the chance to pitch for an opportunity to take it over, under clear rules of operation.

If Mauritius feel it's worth the hassle/money then they'll do so. If not they'll just retire it over 5 years as per the regular process.

Gareth Edwards 2 months ago

@gareth_9984 the BAD precedent for a country having two ccTLDs is the one mentioned in the article: Russia and the .su domain.

But there is also a GOOD one, which is - ironically - Britain. Technically the UK has both .uk and .gb, as they got .uk before the rules were established and (bluntly) that's what University College London asked for first. .UK is, in fact, technically the first ever ccTLD issued!

But the official ISO code for the UK is in fact... GB. So that was also issued in the vain hope that every UK domain holder would flip to that. Nobody did. So since then the UK has had both .uk and .gb. But it has effectively 'frozen' .gb and takes no new registrations on it. Indeed there's only about four .gb addresses left that resolve.

To the point where the UK has now been quietly asking the IANA for a while for them to kill off .gb entirely as a code. But I think the IANA are reluctant to do that because it would create a bad precedent for getting rid of valid ccTLDs. So it's likely to remain in limbo.

But they could do a similar fudge here, with the agreement of Mauritius.

David Carson about 2 months ago

@gareth_9984 it will indeed be interesting to see whether Mauritius feel it's worth the hassle/money. There are certainly countries that find selling domain name to be lucrative and worthwhile, but their economies are all MUCH smaller than that of Mauritius. .io domains are definitely not going to be a situation like the sale of .tv domains being a major portion of Tuvalu's economy.

Barry Garner 2 months ago

Hey Gareth! You’ve raised an interesting point about the potential impact on .io domains.. While the idea that the transfer of sovereignty might lead to its termination is speculative, it's certainly plausible for sure. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which oversees domain names, typically relies on ISO country codes for managing ccTLDs (as you know), so If the British Indian Ocean Territory ceases to exist, it’s possible that the "IO" country code could be revoked. That said, IANA hasn’t officially confirmed anything yet, so the fate of .io remains uncertain. We’ve seen domains like .su (Soviet Union) stick around long after their countries disappeared, so there’s some precedent for flexibility here.

Looking forward to seeing how this unfolds! Personally, I think everything will be fine, but it does highlight the potential complications that can arise when relying on domains outside the .com powerhouse. With .com being globally established and not tied to any country, it offers a level of stability that many ccTLDs can’t always guarantee. I imagine we’ll be having similar discussions about .ai domains in the future, since they are tied to Anguilla. While it’s unlikely, the rules could change down the line, potentially leaving users with little control.

Gareth Edwards 2 months ago

@barrygarner GB/UK is a similar dual-delegation. So yes, there is precedent. But the most recent has been bad (SU).

Personally my instinct is that Mauritius will be given the chance to take it over, on quite strict terms (to avoid an SU situation again). If they decide they want to do that (and that there's money in it) then they will.

If not, the IANA will just deprecate it over 5 years, once its removed from the ISO spec.

@adityainduraj 2 months ago

Georgeo Pulikkathara about 2 months ago

I did not know this. Thank you for sharing.

Every

What Comes Next in Tech

Subscribe to get new ideas about the future of business, technology, and the self—every day