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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

Is it expected that the population of a country would benefit directly from TLD sales? I have not seen a dime of the proceeds from .us.

I guess the money probably goes into the treasury, but it can't be more than a drop in the bucket.

I still think TLDs in general were a mistake. It always felt life a leftover from the old Usenet dominated Internet. The Internet quickly outgrew the categorization system and we ended up where we are today with most everything being shoved in .com because it was the least strict.

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Tuvalu makes "several million dollars a year" from .tv domains [1], and their total GDP is only ~$35M, so at least in Tuvalu's case it's in the range of 10% of their GDP.

[1]: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-16340072

The population of the British Indian Ocean Territory were all deported, to clear the island of Diego Garcia for a large US airbase. It's one of the grubbiest recent bits of British imperial manoevering.

And "recent" here doesn't only mean "the 1970s". TIL: "In 2016, the British government denied the right of the Chagossians to return to the islands after a 45-year legal dispute". [1]

Also, in 2009 an attempt was made to prevent resettlement by declaring the area a marine reserve. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagossians#Court_battle

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depopulation_of_Chagossians_fr...

Sounds like the UK has effectively given away the atoll to the US. The US is not going to pack up their very important torture base just because the UK asks them to. Denying the islanders permission to return is just a face-saving move to avoid admitting that the UK no longer controls the territory.

I think of this everytime I see .io domains :/ It's a very sad story.

Grubby is an understatement. We "persuaded" people off the island by (for instance) not letting them back in when they returned from holidays, rationing their food and drink, and literally gassing their dogs in front of them.

Edit to add: just to be clear, the UK had bought these people's homeland something like five years previously. Bought.

>literally gassing their dogs in front of them.

This hits me from a deep emotional place. We shouldn't do things like this. The deeper and more connected this giant web becomes for me, and the more parts I know about, the more everything I've ever known comes into question. It feels as if the final episode will be the big reveal that Bruce Wayne is on the therapist's lounge discovering his second alter-ego, the Joker.

What is this giant web you are referring to?

Its far more than this, the original inhabitants of .io were forcibly removed from these islands by the UK in the 60s. The whole situation with a UK company running this TLD is just the icing on the cake.

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/

> Is it expected that the population of a country would benefit directly from TLD sales? I have not seen a dime of the proceeds from .us.

On the scale of a territory like BIOT, it is a reasonable expectation; Tuvalu is a high-profile example. However, the point is that there are no Chagossian representatives who have had a say in the organisation or governance of the territory's Internet infrastructure. There are a multitude of possibilities for how the .io ccTLD could be operated, but Chagossians have not had the opportunity to influence or decide them. In the absence of that, it seems right that the relatively lucrative .io registration business is used in some way to the benefit of displaced Chagossians.

> I have not seen a dime of the proceeds from .us.

On the scales of US budget, it's not likely that income of any government enterprise would noticeably affect your personal income. It may be different for smaller nations.

There is a difference, though, between "the legal representative of the country controls the domain and gets money from it, which they distribute as they see fit" and "somebody having no connection with the country controls the domain and gets money from it". The first may not be ideal, especially for countries with oppressive governments, but makes sense. The second makes much less sense, if we talk about geographic domains at least.

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