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Comment by srik | Hacker News Reader

The British Indian Ocean Territory does not have a "general population". It's a perfectly good waste of a short and meaningful TLD, which we already have a few of as it is.

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.io isn't the only one either. There's quite a few ccTLD for countries that don't exist, never existed, or have never had a permant population. I can't imagine Google does geographical targeting for the lesser used ones like .co.ck. (for the Cook Islands off Australia).

Looks like a useful TLD for some kind of websites

Another one is the Heard Island and McDonald Islands, which have the .hm ccTLD [1] despite having no human inhabitants.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heard_Island_and_McDonald_Islan...

Edit: Corrected domain. Thanks @jonemo.

.hn is Honduras, I think you meant to type .hm

If you are wondering if show.hn and ask.hn are valid: No, Hondorus uses the *.[com|net|org|edu|...].hn format [1]

Edit: Ignore that second part. It's wrong. You can register .hn and someone did that for show.hn and ask.hn. You can have ask.hn for $10k [2]. Didn't do thorough enough research earlier because I was on my phone and my fingers are fat and the touchscreen buttons small.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.hn

[2] http://www.sedo.com/search/details.php4?language=us&doma...

Some registries seem to be fairly lenient though, formally domains can't be registered at the second level of .au (must be .com.au or .org.au), yet somehow http://csiro.au/ exists.

Its often the case that these domains were registered by organisations (like, I assume, CSIRO) that had an early internet presence which pre-dates the formal procedures that were later adopted by registrars.

They predate even whois apparently. The web based auDA whois returns absolutely no data too.

    $ whois csiro.au
    No Data Found

Also strange things like .britishlibrary.uk in the early days no one quite knew how naming was going to pan out.

How chauvinist is this reply. I would not have thought to see such a thing on HN.

I don't see how it's chauvinist to suggest that a "country" with no human inhabitants except for foreign military personnel doesn't need its own ccTLD.

that's because it isn't.

It is. Removing natives, stealing their land, then declaring there is no population so you also get their TLD is chauvinist.

So when I remove you forcibly from your land (which the inhabitants were by the British government), then I steal your land and later I declare there is "no general population" so you have no right to a TLD either, it is not chauvinist when I declare you non existent? Because you were native and could not defend yourself against a modern army?

"On 11 May 2006, the High Court ruled that a 2004 Order in Council preventing the Chagossians' resettlement of the islands was unlawful, and consequently that the Chagossians were entitled to return to the outer islands of the Chagos Archipelago. [...] According to a WikiLeaks disclosure document, in a calculated move in 2009 to prevent re-settlement of the BIOT by native Chagossians, the UK proposed that the BIOT become a "marine reserve" with the aim of preventing the former inhabitants from returning to their lands. " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory

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