Anyone who is buying vanity domains, nevermind tech companies, is giving the British government far more money every year through taxes, even in the US. And divestment from the .io TLD is not, as far as I can see anywhere in the advocacy links they provided, cited as part of their activism, so doing it doesn't send a message to anyone.

If the Chagos people are not making the argument for divestment, why is the author?

In another blog post the same author equates Apple taking out ads on Twitter, to Apple doing anti-LGBT+ advocacy, and I think there's an important parallel to this post:

It's one thing to hold views like

• "Twitter is anti-LGBT+ and I won't use them"
• "Britain is settler-colonialist, and I won't support them"

But taking those viewpoints, which are very much NOT the common view by most people, and then using them to accuse said people of being pro-settler-colonial or anti-LGBT+, is not a workable or even helpful position.

If all the tech companies divest of their .io domain names right now, what will that gain the Chagos people? If we're being honest, absolutely nothing. Hell, if the companies don't all issue press releases as they do it, I doubt even the Chagos refugees themselves would think it had anything to do with them.

Maybe I'm just getting tired of activism that seems content to revel in its own... mindfulness, we'll call it- without actually trying to change anything, but it feels like the author would have been hard-pressed to choose a position to advocate that has LESS chance of helping the Chagos people without just being totally unrelated.

TL;DR

.io represents the British Indian Ocean Territory 🇮🇴, which is basically a joint UK/US military base as a state. It was formed after natives were forcefully evicted off of those islands to construct it.

While this is an interesting read, this doesn't appear to be the case:

Every .io domain you buy funds a government committing crimes against humanity.

The .io TLD wikipedia article claims that it has always been operated by private entities and no revenue is shared with the United Kingdom

A bit too exaggerated I might say... There are many things in this world that fund institutions that may be less ethical in their practices. But to write 10 pages about such a small thing I'd say is too much. We have more important things to worry about rn. I'll keep this in mind when buying a domain? But is that the solution..

Good grief.

Like reading 10 pages that Milkshake duck is racist.

I find it funny how King Charles III is King of so many vanity domains. .gg? Guernsey. .io? Indian Ocean Territory, a UK overseas territory. .TV? Tuvalu, a commonwealth realm.

agar.io in shambles

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What is also sad here is that this is not news. I remember reading a story about this at least 3 years ago. All those cool tech websites are just handng money over, sometimes knowingly.

Is CW the same as TW (trigger warning)? If so, what does the C stand for?

I have a similar story, not well known as well... but yeah, this is close to home.