Comment by WorldMaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WorldMaker | Hacker News Reader

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All two letter TLDs are some country's code. .tv (the oldest and longest example of a popular country code used by businesses) is Tuvalu but Tuvalu makes a nice revenue in all the television domains so they are mostly happy with the arrangement. It amuses me how much it bugs some of my friends when I ask what they are watching today on "Twitch dot Tuvalu".

A more controversial example is .io for the Chagos Islands which was assigned .io because at various times it has been referred to by its colonialist name the British Indian Ocean Territory. As a place it is full of ugly history including the British forcefully exiling big parts of the native population to help the US build a military base there. The registrar in charge of .io is a British company and the money has almost never benefited the natives or residents of the Chagos Islands. But it became the "hip" tech company TLD because it looks like input/output. There have been multiple awareness campaigns trying to get tech companies to offset this colonial bias in internet infrastructure with donations to useful charities.

.eu is an exception as it is for the European Union but they don't consider themselves a country.

While they're commonly called "country codes", being a country is not a requirement for having one.

Consider .uk vs .gb

.aq for Antarctica

.ax is part of Finland (.fi)

and so on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependent_territory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

Since Europeans were first to discover and settle on the islands, wouldn't they have a greater claim to "indigenous" status than later ethnic groups? I genuinely don't understand, having had a quick read of the history, how your narrative of "colonialism" (in the pejorative) fits the actual timeline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagossians

> The Chagossians are a mix of African, South Asian, and Malay descent. The French brought some to the Chagos Islands as slaves from Mauritius in 1776. Others arrived as fishermen, farmers, and coconut plantation workers during the 19th century. Under international law, they are the indigenous peoples of the Chagos archipelago, as they are descended from the earliest human settlers of the islands.

How are they descended from the earliest settlers if European ancestry is not listed? I read the same Wiki article but only just picked up on this now. That these non-European groups were slaves and (much later) foreign workers only further cements the status of the Europeans as the original settlers of these islands.

Basically European settlers were a small group of people, who took with them a huge amount of people to work as slaves. Eventually, the small group of Europeans left, but the slaves were still there, turned workers and into the population who lived there.

Eventually though, the UK government came back again, and forcefully removed these people who weren't natives before, but essentially because of forced re-population by colonizers became the natives. Now they want access to the land they were forcefully migrated to, after being removed from it.

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