This one is a little bit off-topic and I hope, the lounge is an appropriate place for it. Yesterday, I stumbled upon an article that raises a political correctness issue with .io domains. Here you can read the whole story:
What do you think about it? Should software companies or products who like the .io meme so far should better distance themselves from that toplevel domain?
Hey @stefanm, that’s really interesting! This is the first time I’ve heard of this issue. We’ll investigate it a little more and figure out next steps. Thanks for making us aware!
In my opinion, the article was very long and the relation it drew was fairly… obscure - so to speak. While it is a top-level domain assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory, that doesn’t in and of itself make it wrong to use by any means. In fact, it is almost always used today in the tech industry because of I/O or Input/Output. This likely, in a way, improves the SEO of the Anytype website since it validly is a tech sort of thing. Plus, I always found .io domains to be more pleasing than standard .com, .org, .net domains. Human history is full of certain groups, governments, and individuals doing something that is “wrong.” If we point out that various malicious sites use .com domains, .net domains, etc. - does that make it wrong to use those? I think it would be very confusing to change Anytype’s domain, especially since even the Slack community is “anytypeio.” I think tech companies should still embrace using the .io top-level domain because it symbolizes computing (input/output) on the modern-day web and makes the URL to the site aesthetically pleasing.
The crux of the article is this:
The proposal came to pass. The United States of America was given the power to sell and profit from
".us"domains. Britain was given".uk"domains. And she got her stolen territory’s".io"domains, too.And so, finally, I reach my point.
Every
.iodomain you buy funds a government committing crimes against humanity. Every.iodomain you renew legitimises and reinforces the continued exile of the Chagossians.
That’s the meat of it, that money spent on .io domains goes to the government responsible for the maltreatment and exile of the Chagossians.
And that Chagossians arent getting of any of it
Only “some” of the money goes to the United Kingdom (if any at all). Google treats the domain as a generic domain. There are certain legal proceedings about the domain, but I do not see this as a reason to switch the domain which would, as I stated earlier, make it confusing for users who are used to the current domain. I don’t think we should be all too bothered since there are more than 270,000 .io domains registered. Anytype switching the domain of their website would therefore be a meaningless boycott and would remind me of someone who was boycotting Nabisco products for political reasons. Just because you buy certain products or have a certain domain, doesn’t mean you support the ideology of the company who makes the product or the history behind the domain. Plus, nobody appears to have a plan of what domain to switch to. It’s ultimately the team’s choice of what they want to do, but this seems like an obscure reason to suddenly change the domain of the Anytype website in my opinion.
I mostly agree with @23jjl.
I don’t want to be a doomer, but from my knowledge about their issue, I doubt that they’ll be getting their land back any time soon, if ever.
There’s a lot to be done before this wrong has been righted, but a part of that has got to be the redirection of profits from
.iosales and renewals from the British government to the Chagossian people. And then, if the Chagossian people are amenable to global sales of.iodomains, for the name to enjoy a second renaissance and financially support the right people.
So this is something that at least seems feasible.
If the team really wants to do something about this, maybe donating a certain amount to a charity / non-profit that deals with their issue could be the way to go?