British Government Continues Appalling Treatment Of Chagos Islands, Taking .IO Profits

The .io ccTLD has become popular among start-ups, but little do registrants know that the British government, who has forcibly removed the archipelago’s inhabitants from 1967 to 1973 to make way for the US military’s air strip at Diego Garcia, takes a cut of the profits from registrations.

The islands are now formally known as the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) and have no permanent residents apart from British and American military personnel, reports The Independent. Domain names for the islands have been available from a UK-based company called the Internet Computer Bureau for around £60 to £70 each, depending on registrar. Or around twice that if the registrants is outside the European Union. The former islanders though have no idea of the deal.

“Profits from the sale of each .io domain flow to the very force that expelled the Chagossian or Ilois people from their equatorial land just a generation or two ago: the British government,” reported GigaOM who broke the story.

Allen Vincatassin, president of the Diego Garcia and Chagos Islands Council, told The Independent: “We do not know what sort of income is being received from the sale of these internet domains and to what use it is being put. This another example of money being behind the backs of Chagossians.

“The Government should disclose how much money it has received and provides assurances that it will be used for the islands, including the resettlement that so many Chagossians want to see happen.”

Revenue from registrations though has the potential to benefit the islands, or at least the islanders should they ever be able to return following their shameful expulsion. Examples of ccTLDs becoming lucrative earners for countries or territories are .tv (Tuvalu), .me (Montenegro) and .co (Colombia).

“The British government granted these rights to ICB chief Paul Kane back in the 1990s. ICB gets to run .io ‘more or less indefinitely, unless we make a technical mistake,’ Kane told GigaOM. (ICB has so far run a stable .io namespace. It should be noted that Kane is a respected veteran of the infrastructure scene, and has been entrusted by ICANN with one of the 7 so-called “keys to the internet”.)

For more on this story from the original reports, go to:
gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how-the-u-k-is-making-web-domain-profits-from-a-shady-cold-war-land-deal/
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/government-accused-of-profiting-from-sales-of-chagos-islands-io-domain-name-9574316.html