For the sake of my own sanity, lets just be clear here:

1. An island chain was forcibly depopulated in order for the largest land mass to be leased to the United States as a strategically important military base away from outside observers which has since been used as a staging post for the renditions of people to illegal prisons on US sovereign territory.

2. The former inhabitants of the Island are prevented from returning thanks to a tricky piece of political gamesmanship which classfieid the island chain as a marine park unable to sustain human population, whilst at the same time permitting the construction and continuous growth of one of the United States largest overseas military bases.

3. The Chagossians - now living in slums in Mauritius - or even worse - Kent, have limited access to education, die younger than they ought to, and are prevented from prospering in exile thanks to their ill treatment at the hands of the Mauritian government, the same government paid to help Britain pave the way for the above heinous acts.

4. The natural resources of the islands, the land, the sea, the soil, the strategically important geographic position, the TLD, the international dialling code, the airspace - all of this was stolen when the people were forcibly removed. You may discuss the merits of TLD sovereignty somewhere else, this is not the issue at hand here. If Britain can sell and profit from .uk domain names, the Chagossians deserve that same right as equals.

This is not about a TLD, it is about the abhorrent treatment of a small nation at the hands of a large one. It is the grossest example of the same kind of tawdry crap which colonial powers of past and present have gotten away with for centuries. Your ignorance and self-serving positions are staggering, disappointing, and completely unsurprising.

The relationship between Palestine and the IANA is not very similar to .io and the Chagossians. Palestine has two TLDs—.ps and .فلسطين—that are managed by a Palestinian—not Israeli—naming authority, PNINA. As such, using the Palestinian TLD is considered[1] a mark of solidarity with the concept of a Palestinian state, not a reminder of, or the exploitation of, a forced exile.

[1]: http://www.pnina.ps/domains/

But: You can't excuse one wrong with another wrong. The fight about the TLDs might be some little thing, but what happened to those people is an outspoken injustice and I can't comprehend, how modern countries could do such things in the last decades.

The comparison to native Americans is good, because it shows, that the methods are still the same, the deeds are just hidden better nowadays.

Nobody is trying to say that Native Americans didn't get a raw deal; only one person is trying to say that because Native Americans got a raw deal a few hundred years ago, it's OK to do the same to the Chagossians right now. This is the sort of logic people always employ when they're trying to feel better about participating in something shitty. It's the "But he hit me first!" of ethics.

And from the Wikileaks cable:

'He asserted that establishing a marine park would, in effect, put paid to resettlement claims of the archipelago's former residents. Responding to Polcouns' observation that the advocates of Chagossian resettlement continue to vigorously press their case, Roberts opined that the UK's "environmental lobby is far more powerful than the Chagossians' advocates." '

That's just ugly and wrong.

Haha I can think of a few leaders of other nations who might enjoy this power.

Of course I have sympathy for refugees of all sorts. However, although the Chagossians were definitely screwed out of their home, it doesn't follow that they have been screwed out of ".io" money. It is an accident of history that TLDs are relatively scarce, that national governments may extract economic rents from TLDs, that some ccTLDs have no corresponding national government, and that the UK happens to own ".io". Nothing any Chagossian ever did entitles her or her descendants to this money.

In a better world than ours, there would be billions of TLDs, and the value of any one of them would be negligible.

Two thoughts:

1) What if the resource from the Chagossians' island was oil and not a domain name; would that be different? Wouldn't your same argument about rents apply?

2) Maybe rents in general are an accident of history, as you say, but why should the UK benefit from this accident and not the Chagossians? If oil was found under your home, would you mind giving the revenue to the UK, since its presence and value is an accident of history?

I agree that the constraint on TLDs is mostly artificial.

1) Different entirely. First, "mineral rights" are decided in various ways, but one of those is actual possession of the overlying real estate. So, when one's land is stolen, one's valuable mineral resources might also be stolen. The connection between the string "io" and the Chagos Islands is much more tenuous.

2) Not quite what I meant. If ICANN or somesuch were to decide to repossess ".io" from UK and give the proceeds to the Chagos Islands Refugees' Association, I would applaud. Arguably, other displaced and conquered peoples might similarly deserve a TLD. The point is that a process must be followed, and until it is the Chagossians have no particular claim to this or any other alphabetic string.

Now say that 50 years later, its realised that there's a whole load of diamonds under the airport (not known to anyone). Clearly, we would not compensate the original owners.

The only difference here is that the people who owned the land were not compensated for it. Those people are now mostly dead or nearly dead.

    $ whois apple.gripe

    Registrant Organization: Apple Inc.
    Registrant Email: domains@apple.com

I think it has more to do with Apple not wanting anyone else to own TLDs with its name in it, then due to some legal requirement to register them all. In other words, they'd have done it anyway even if trademarks weren't a concer.

Imagine a world without trademarks. The US would be flooded with iPhone knockoffs, and all of them would be identical to iPhones. They'd have god-knows-what inside them, but they'd bear the Apple logo.

Or, imagine you want to pay your American Express bill. Unfortunately, someone has bought AmericanExpress.card, and you get confused. You end up inputting your AmEx login info into a phishing site and give a hacker your personal data.

In a world without trademarks, Apple and American Express wouldn't have the legal authority to pursue people that are imitating them.

B) This anti-phishing idea is security theater. If you teach cardholders that a URL will save them from getting phished, they'll get phished. This is analogous to, though quite a bit worse than, the idea that a logo guarantees authenticity, even in our current regime. (E.g., some of those who thought they had purchased FTDI components were discovered recently to have not done.)

Re: B) I completely disagree. I frequently visit mail.google.com, and I trust that I'm not getting phished. I'm going purely on the basis of the URL there. I wouldn't feel the same way going to, say, mail.google.me.

In order to trust a URL, you must be sure that your client system isn't compromised (and nothing in between). If it is, you're vulnerable to much worse than phishing. Phishing is likely unnecessary at that point.

It has nothing to do with the URL being secure or insecure. Using web-enabled computers on a daily basis means that we're trusting our systems not to be infected by unknown/undetected malware. We don't have any alternative, so we take the risk.

There are many ways to be slightly more certain that our DNS records haven't been tampered with nowadays, but we're still basically trusting hackable systems all the time.

[0] http://www.amny.com/entertainment/mike-bloomberg-domains-reg...

In Britain we essentially go by the philosophy that parliament represents the people, and parliament is the highest authority in the country. If the government doesn't like a decision made by a court, the idea is that the law can be changed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_in_Council#United_Kingdom

Yes, these unfortunate souls have suffered generations of evil, starting with the slave trade and finish off with being expelled from the island(s). That said, I don't really see the argument that it is somehow their land. Should they have been properly compensated or better yet relocated somewhere with better conditions than what they had? Absolutely! In fact, it seems that a law suite seeking that compensation might have better luck than trying to reclaim the land.

The example used earlier with the Balkans is so much more complicated. Depending on who's side of history you take, all sides have a claim to most of the land in the Balkans. Things seem to be much more clear cut here.

I don't see a good argument that any land belongs to any person on earth. That said, subsisting off a single piece of land for 250 years is a much better claim than "we want this for economic/military development". I also tend not to side with the party that gasses 1000 pet dogs as part of their forced relocation process.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/18/the-story-of-the-chag...

About 1,000 pet dogs were taken – some straight from screaming children – and gassed with exhaust fumes from American military vehicles.

The argument is that they had lived there for generations and made it very much their homeland - only to be turfed out at the whim of a remote, overbearing colonial power.

These situations are much more complicated than the surface view that the "big evil colonial empire" is picking on defenseless people.

If the original wrong of enslaving the population was corrected, the people relocated by force would have never been on the island in the first place. This of course is impossible.

There are many more similar arguments for either side that one could make. It just shows the unproductive nature of such disputes.

A much more productive approach would have been about compensation and rehabilitation of the displaced persons. Surely there are many things they need that can be provided to improve their lot in life. I strongly doubt that giving this island back (even if the military was willing to give it up) after all these years is going to do them any good.

This situation seems pretty clear cut. Hardly anybody ever heard about these people, and the colonial administrator clearly thought them barely human. When there was an opportunity to make a quick buck on their back, no consideration was given to what they may think of it. That's precisely a colonial attitude.

> If the original wrong of enslaving the population was corrected, the people relocated by force would have never been on the island in the first place.

I'd say the least you can do, when you have been mercilessly exploiting a group of people for generations, isn't to screw them over a second time because you can make some money out of it. Especially when you're rather hypocritically talking about "human rights" and "democracy". Not to say that other western democracies don't share the same hypocrisy (the US democratized the native Americans to death, the French defended "freedom" during WWI and WWII while happily oppressing their colonies, etc...). However, "others do it too" isn't a valid defence after kindergarten.

It's interesting how the metatext works around here, isn't it?

edit Whoops, I meant Libya.

Had history unfolded as the OP wanted then .io would simply not exist. Alternatively, if the islands were to become independent in the future then they would no longer be the British Indian Ocean Territory, by definition, and likewise have no logical claim on (or even need for) the .io domain.

It's easy to feel sorry for these people, but it's hard to see how they have a claim on something which was never theirs and is an administrative construct of a territory which they never lived in, which would ultimately be abolished in some future ideal world.

Given the article's many complaints about the U.S. military and the CIA, I can't help thinking that the OP might have a more compelling case for boycotting .com domains.

If the islanders had not been forcibly displaced in the 1960s, they would most probably have been had some say in the governance of .io, as other British overseas territories have done for their respective domains.

The mostly is significant; in several cases the ISO was over-ridden and arbitrary but sensible codes assigned e.g. UK instead of GB. Many smaller territories were not granted codes in ISO3166 and had to be 'invented' for the TLDs

ISO3166 is in itself a bit of a mess, and since it became used for TLDs there have been dozens of requests for changes and additions based on new TLD assignments.

I think most people that purchase/visit an .IO domain have little idea what geological place is tied to it. It sounds like the money goes to the British government to use as they see fit, and I doubt many people would have a problem with that in the first place if it wasn't in this unfortunate geopolitcal context.

About Name.Space: http://namespace.us/about.php

A good interview of Paul Garrin can be found here: http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9805/msg0005...

When the US requested the forced expulsion of the Chagossians, the Queen could act unilaterally since she is still the direct ruler of the British Indian Ocean Territory.

According to Wikipedia, there is a commissioner with the Foreign Office that acts as administrator, but that commissioner is directly appointed by the Queen [2].

1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing_a_Nation

2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_the_British_India...

While this may be technically true, the monarch's powers (the royal prerogatives[0]) are almost exclusively exercised on the advice of the prime minister/cabinet.

In other words, while the power officially rests with the Queen, the UK government is the one to wield it in practice.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_prerogative

The right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates is not a human right.

This applies at every scale from a single building demolished to make way for a highway, to an entire country's worth of refugees.

So the big problem is not that Britain evicted the Chagossians and is refusing to let them back. That was just a case of eminent domain. The problem is that Britain and Mauritius never properly compensated them and didn't ensure that they could make a living in their new home.

If redistributing the profits from .io to these people would make goddess of justice smile, fine, let's do it. But enough with the "it's my ancestral home!" bullshit.

As the article mentions, the Chagossians weren't even the "native" or "original" population of the islands. The French had enslaved them and brought them there by force, and the rest were migrant workers from India. None of them had any right to claim those islands as their home, except that they happened to live there at the time when Britain decided to vacate the islands.

In fact, none of us have any right to claim any piece of real estate as our own. The law, of course, grants certain people certain rights with respect to land, for the sake of convenience and economic efficiency. But morally, it's all arbitrary. Why does it matter whether someone has lived on a piece of land for three generations or three hundred? What about nomadic peoples who claim a large swath of land but only use parts of it sporadically? Besides, virtually all habitable land on Earth has been conquered multiple times by different groups of people, all of whom might have some sort of claim on that land.

Whenever we hear about some group of people who complain that their house, village, country, etc. was taken from them, the location in question rarely has anything more than sentimental value for the oldest members of that group. What really matters are human rights (e.g. right to participate in the governance of whatever territory they happen to live in) and the ability to make a stable living. Without those, returning the land to them won't make their circumstances any better. Nostalgia doesn't put food on your table. On the other hand, once you have rights and a stable occupation, over time you learn to stop fussing about your location.

The idea that some people have some sort of god-given right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates has caused so much bloodshed, unnecessary grief, and opportunity for ideologues to take advantage of innocent people throughout human history. Can't we just stop doing that already?

1) Eminent domain seems valid if it's exercised by the victims' legitimate government, which they elect and over which they have a say, and under which they have rights and the ability to legally protect themselves. My impression[1] is that none of that applies to the Chagossians. The UK appears[1] to have taken advantage of their helplessness. For example, imagine if the UK took your land (assuming you are not in the UK) and you had no appeal.

> none of us have any right to claim any piece of real estate as our own. The law, of course, grants certain people certain rights with respect to land. But morally, it's all arbitrary.

2) That is one point of view but it's a radical one. Our society places great moral store in property rights; many leading philosophers think it is the foundation of all other rights and of democracy. Certainly few react well to someone else taking away their home; people fight wars over that.

3) One aspect of human rights is that it's up to Chagossians to decide what they want and what is good for them. It's not up to you or anyone else to dictate that something is or is not in their interests.

4) I suspect it is much harder for what I'm guessing[1] are members of a small, isolated community that has only existed on an island to move than for the wordly high-tech entrepreneurs reading this thread. Where should they move? Sri Lanka? Delhi? Kenya? An apartment in the Mission? Another island where the locals already control it and the newcomers may not be welcome? Where the fish and everything else are different?

[1] I say "my impression' and 'it appears' because I don't know the facts well enough to be sure.

1) I'm not disputing that it was wrong for UK to evict the Chagossians. I'm only disputing that the Chagossians have some sort of fundamental human right to return all these years later, just because their grandfathers used to live there.

2) Yes, many leading philosophers of previous centuries used to think very highly of property rights, but this trend has greatly diminished in the last 50 years or so, especially in Anglo-American political philosophy.

In any case, I'm pretty sure that if I offered a significant premium over the prevailing market price, most people will be happy to sell their home and move elsewhere. Especially if I also offered to cover their cost of moving and lost wages while they look for a new job. (That's roughly what I think every government should offer when they need to relocate people.)

3) I totally agree. It was wrong for the UK to move them without their consent. But what is done is done, and now it's time to ask what to do about it.

If I break your phone, property rights mean that you have the right to make me compensate for your material losses. It doesn't mean that you have the right to make me restore your broken phone to its original condition, no matter how much sentimental value it might have had for you.

4) That's a genuine problem. If it is impossible to ensure an equal or greater quality of life for the relocated population, perhaps that's a good reason not to relocate them in the first place. On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that a country like UK would be unable to arrange a fantastic life (at least materially) for a few hundred islanders no matter where in the world they were. They were simply unwilling to do it, just as they were unwilling to consult the locals before deciding to lease Chagos to the Americans.

tl;dr: Something very bad happened. But making it right is not simply a matter of resetting HEAD to a previous commit.

I never said that what is done is OK, only that it is done. It was most definitely NOT OK for Britain to displace Chagossians the way they did, because adequate compensation did not occur. I think I made this very clear in the parent comment.

But Returning Chagos to the Chagossians now will not fix any of the million things that went wrong. We have plenty of nominally independent but barely subsisting island nations in this world, we seriously don't need another. What is needed is a concrete plan to get the Chagossians (and their descendents) out of those Mauritian slums in which Britain so carelessly dumped them 50 years ago. Returning them to Chagos might or might not be a part of this plan, but if they insist on it at the expense of more urgent material needs, so much the worse for them.

"What's done is done," but we can do more. For example: British passports, British pensions, British health care, British education for their children, a formal apology, and fair political representation. Keep adding to the list until their children can honestly say they're glad that their parents left their former home. That would count as adequate compensation.

What? That's exactly what happened here.

The Chagossians were forcibly removed, because a government(s) claimed "the right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates". If the Chagossians don't have that right, then no one else can come in and force them out.

The UK and USA only ever claimed a legal right within the framework of their own laws. Despicable as their actions may be, they never pretended to claim a human right.

The displaced Chagossians, on the other hand, are claiming a human right to occupy the islands. That's different.

Might may not make right, but it certainly helps. Other states may have some moral obligation to step in to defend a human rights violation, but only the government of a state is expected to protect its legal rights.

The occupier always has bigger guns, more power, and no opposition from a third party. They don't need to compensate.

2) they are given freedom to move to a place where they can enjoy human rights and make an adequate living.

Still a world full of refugees being smuggled into countries as illegal immigrant because what countries will accept them?

The only people who are moved and given (1) or (2) are ones that have a sufficiently good BATNA.

"This is going to be controversial" --- I'd say so. I almost thought it was a troll.

Well said. So the question is: how do we build a world where residents of a small island can develop a sufficiently good BATNA, even against a nuclear superpower?

Fixing problems at the level of the basic architecture can sometimes seem to go against fixing superficial symptoms. If you're too focused on the symptoms, it might even sound heretical. Sufficiently esoteric political philosophy is often indistinguishable from trolling ;)

"Easy" in politics is when you get something done, look back, and find less than ten thousand dead bodies behind you.

How can you measure (in order to attempt to "adequately compensate" displaced people) the inability to live in one's ancestral homeland? Imagine if we were all shipped to a somewhat earth-like moon somewhere, under "eminent domain".

In some jurisdictions, the law might award a certain percentage of additional damages for psychological harm, but that's about it. Sentimental value is purely subjective. Brutal as it may sound, impartial assessments cannot and need not account for such things.

Nobody's ancestral homeland is irreplaceable. In fact, the whole concept of ancestral homelands is often a religious or ideological fabrication that serves the interests of some members of a community but not others.

Forcibly removing people from their land deprives them of the systems that sustain them: political, economic, cultural. It's a kidnapping and theft rolled into one.