What an interesting read! As our lives become more connected online, it’s important to understand how decisions made by governments can impact the digital world.
Gareth Edwards shares some eye-opening insights about the potential loss of the .io domain and what that means for us all.
Read more below:
The Disappearance of an Internet Domain
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.
https://every.to/p/the-disappearance-of-an-internet-domain?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
