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.
pull down to refresh
related posts
I have been thinking about domains a lot lately. We all allow ourselves to be subjugated to these agencies. I really like the idea of unbreakable domains that cannot be taken down, or even better a nostr like whole new way of identifying and hosting sites in a distributed, decentralized way. I'm sure it's not so simple.
In the past was a very interesting fork of bitcoin named Namecoin (NMC). It was also merged mined together with BTC. It was a promise of decentralized domain names. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin https://www.namecoin.org/docs/faq/
But unfortunately the project died. Now is just a shitcoin. But for a truly decentralized system, we need a full IPv6 standard.
Have you heard of IPFS? That was a project I was interested in for a while, with the idea of an address space based on content rather than server. (You search for the hash of a piece of data and anyone hosting that data can serve it to you.)
They have a coin associated with it, Filecoin I believe.
But I haven't really kept up with it. I just thought the idea was interesting.
They are a weakpoint. I think gnunet has solved the problem elegantly, but is has little adoption and is kind of rickety to get to function.
I think you could operate some sort of peer-to-peer network, but a lot of them still require domain registration to provide individual domain addresses. A domain is like a network of many machines. IPV6 is able to give every machine ever made and, I think, any machine ever to be made in the future an individual address, but these are machine specific and not network specific. This is why there is the Domain Name Address system ( I am forgetting the exact name for it). Domains are for separate networks
It's possible today to make independent domains through bitcoin ordinals. There's a browser for the bitcoin internet already:
https://www.zin.so/
Neat, I'd not heard of this before.
I messed around with ordinal websites a year ago. Neat that you can house everything on the bitcoin blockchain (code, images, etc).
My write up: https://peakd.com/hive/@crrdlx/recursive-inscriptions-part-2-of-3-case-studies Ordinal: https://www.ord.io/34145265
Nice one! Thank you for sharing! :)
.iois so central and important to many companies that I doubt they will do anything. They will work something out so that nothing really changes.Absolutely, but worst case with added KYC and a serious price hike...
I'm sure I'm not alone in this but I will be shocked if this doesn't get worked out.
Easy for me to say since I don't have an .io domains but there are good incentives for this to get figured out.
This.
Yes, that makes sense. These government yahoos know little to nothing about technology and how the internet runs. I guess everything runs on blue smoke and automagically. If you think they know different, please change my mind.
Just looked this up on google maps. It looks like a peaceful relaxing island.
Are all .io domains from this area?
All .io domains belong to this country because it's a ccTLD (country code top level domain), yes.
Wait a minute...so everyone with an .io domain has to switch now? That's a lot of bitcoin related domains...
Soon but yes, that's the problem
Is that really a big loss, or just a novelty? "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." I guess I never thought of this aspect when I was thinking of domains...
We have to first know what rules do Mauritius have for domains or free internet? Mauritius is a tech friendly country. Isn't it?
https://techcabal.com/2024/04/27/mauritius-ecosystem-feature/