The article starts with "everything is FACT"<p>then ends with:<p>Every .io domain you buy funds a government committing crimes against humanity. Every .io domain you renew legitimises and reinforces the continued exile of the Chagossians.<p>which is hyperbole at best, and bollocks at worst. .io isn't sold or owned by the british (or US) government<p>Most people don't understand what .io is for, moreover the UK goverment has almost no idea what .io stands for.<p>so to say that its supporting crimes against humanity is somewhat of a stretch. Thats like saying that watching pakistan play cricket is supporting the deportation of 1.4 million afghan refugees.
Apparently the UK government does <i>not</i> get any income from .io sales:<p>Wikipedia - .io - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io</a><p>> In 2014, Kane claimed that "profits are distributed to the authorities for them to operate services as they see fit" and that "Each of the overseas territories has an account and the funds are deposited there because obviously the territories have expenses that they incur and it’s offsetting that." However the UK government has repeatedly stated that this is untrue: “There is no agreement between the UK Government and ICB regarding the administration of the .io domain” and "the Government <i>receives no revenues from the sales or administration of this domain.</i>"<p>So, you aren't funding the UK government, just a 'British entrepreneur' who bought the rights to multiple TLDs... I'm not sure that's better, but it's different.
I would go further and say this: Never treat foreign ccTLD’s (two-letter domains) as anything you can just register and use a domain in. You should only ever use a ccTLD of your own country or region you actually have your main presence in.<p>Your domain name is often your most secure key to your entire online identity, and you want that to be on as a secure legal footing as possible.<p>Older discussion here: <<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32797286#32801880">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32797286#32801880</a>><p>Disclaimer: I work at a domain name registrar.
Isn’t funding .uk and .us domains just as bad then, if you’re going by the amount of blood that is on a countries hands(regarding this particular piece of history, or all of it)?
This has "Pumpkin Spice is Violence" [0] vibes.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/10/06/history-pumpkin-spice-colonialsim-dutch/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/10/06/history-pu...</a>
The Wikipedia article captures relevant facts from the blog post, in a tone consistent with Wikipedia's standards, for what that's worth.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io</a><p>I admit I never considered the provenance of .io and its geopolitical history. I also use some .me domains that I now think I should have considered more carefully.<p>Reading about it now, I take the original article's point that a geo TLD that seems cute or fun or clever in one culture could have a very different connotation in another culture.<p>It may or may not be an ethics issue, depending on perspective, but that ambiguity might at the very least be an optics issue, since there is a moral question for at least some reasonable observers.<p>It appears that foreign use of these geo TLDs says <i>something</i> one way or another about a site/service/brand, whether that's support for the country or some sort of colonialism or something else altogether.
I wonder what’s going to happen with <a href="https://notion.so" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://notion.so</a><p>> Oof, sorry about this We chose .so when we were starting out (lots of other companies named Notion, and .so was available). Does it help that we own notion.com now? Automatic redirect for now, but we'll be switching to .com as soon as our engineering team has the bandwidth.<p>Source: <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/f6x9mk/why_the_so_domain/fi8l82f/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://old.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/f6x9mk/why_the_so_d...</a> (3 years ago)
> For my part, I'm working on migrating all my email from @cariad.io to @cariad.earth. It's a pain, but it's worth it.<p>I use a .io domain for my personal email as well. I did not reach the same conclusion though.<p>Hyperbolic pieces like this make me want to double down even further on whatever it is they are so against.
Bottomless outrage seems to be the outlet for a life unlived, unfulfilled. Do something constructive by ignoring thoughts that beg for influence and abuse logic.
Talking about exotic TLDs:<p>An overlooked aspect is that some of them may be way slower to resolve on DNS level:<p><a href="https://blog.nameshield.com/blog/2020/04/30/choosing-the-right-tld-based-on-dns-performance/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://blog.nameshield.com/blog/2020/04/30/choosing-the-rig...</a><p>For example .io is about 50ms slower than .com on p50 and p85 percentiles (2020 data).<p>If you have a "serious" domain you may not want it on a "slow" TLD.
Let me get this straight... the UK and US did some awful stuff and you're asking us to respond by boycotting a TLD which has no meaningful connection to said awful stuff?<p>Thanks for letting me know about the Chagossian tragedy, but this boycot just sounds silly to me.
Interesting thread! This got me curious about the .ai TLD, and the difference with .io, is that Anguilla Island are actually receiving the profit from every domain sold. And it accounts for a large part of their revenue, around $3 million according to Wikipedia <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ai" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ai</a>
"considered harmful" is considered harmful.<p>It's always an opinion, which is fine, but too many of them are half baked, in my opinion.
It's really convenient that you posted this, because I was going to reference a 2014 article about it in a blog post I am working on, but that article has also fallen off the Internet.
Boycotting a TLD is one thing, but does anyone have recommendations for a TLD that they'd recommend? I.E. One where the revenue is likely to have a positive impact somewhere.
Here's a thought -- TLD's shouldn't be coupled to countries at all and should just be a string pointer to an IP address. But that's none of my business...