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Rent seeking behavior from a fallen empire that violently evicted the native people they called "Tarzans" from the very islands .io is supposed to serve? Tell me it ain't so!

History of British Indian Ocean Territories: http://citizen-ex.com/stories/io

Anyone building a brand atop a ccTLD with this kind of history is taking a huge risk.




BITO was uninhabited before it was settled by Europeans. It doesn't have "native people" according to Wikipedia. Unlike .us/au/ca etc. Are those tlds controlled by their native people?


> On 22 May 2019, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution [...] demanding that the United Kingdom unconditionally withdraw its colonial administration from the area within six months.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Chagossians#2...


Any reason to downvote?

PS I think it could a good idea to require some reason when downvoting, otherwise sometimes the context for doing that is completely unclear.


Many communities have adopted the downvote reason functionality, as well as upvote reason.


> BITO was uninhabited before it was settled by Europeans.

This is completely wrong. BIOT includes these islands where the native people were forcibly removed and the story is terrible.

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

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

It's not like this hasn't been discussed many times on HN before. I own a .io but come on!


The Chagossians aren't a counter-example to that at all - they were moved to the islands by European colonialists as a slave labour force, which as I understand it were uninhabited before.


What, did you expect a new lineage of humans to evolve separately there or something?

Of course "native" can be arbitrarily limited to mean 1000s or 10,000s of years, but even after slavery those people lived there for at least five or six generations. So from the perspective of the people being forcibly removed, getting their pet dogs gassed by the military, it really wouldn't fucking matter.

And the Wikipedia article says they're "native", which you explicitly claimed was not the case.


That's not a relevant statement. It has people who were living there before the British controlled the islands.


[flagged]


Debate the comment, don’t attack the person.


HN isn't the place for a debate about colonialism.

I'm not sure there is much 'intellectual curiosity' surrounding any supposed alternatives. Judging the past by the standards of the present isn't a starting point for a discussion.


The past? This is late 1960s to the present.


One might argue that the "late 1960s to the present" does constitute at least part of the past.

Even if we only go back to my childhood in the 1960s, standards and mores were quite different back then.


Yet when other countries are brought up HN's Western userbase appears eager to dig up 100 year old atrocities to judge their present populace by.


Agree that those discussions are a waste. Hope that HN isn't striving for equivalence or equality in illogical assertions along an east/west dichotomy.




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