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Screenshot of a tumblr post
nyancrimew posts:
remember .io games? that was 8 years ago
therealkepler replies:
nowadays the only people that use the .io domain are technology sites
nyancrimew replies:
ok so .io is a “fun” lesson in colonialism and technology, like all two letter top level domains (yes all of them) it’s a country domain belonging to a country, io being the british indian oceans territory, an archipelago in the indian ocean. .io domains became so trendy because they’re easily marketable to tech people (io can stand for input/output), it looks kinda cool and at the time domains with .io were highly available with not many websites being created on the islands.
however .io is not like other small islands with highly wanted tlds such as .ai or .to, where the islands make millions off of domain sales and can rely on them as a big pillar of their economy. all profits from .io sales go to the UK, and despite a fight to get control over their tld the islands get nothing, not only did the native population get displaced in land deals and colonialism but their colonizer also heavily profits off of the territories sudden (indirect) trendyness with tech startups.
don’t buy .io domains, don’t support the british empire.
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I am kind of puzzled that I am not finding that many .it domain names for tech.
EDIT: I looked it up. I forgot it is only available for EU entities. I am one, and got one of them registered for my personal projects a while back. Now I remember sending a document id with the registration to the registrar.
I’ll be honest, I’m aware that IT stands for information technology but… I don’t think I would ever associate a website with .it with anything other than Italy. Maybe other people think the same and that’s why it’s less popular?
Or maybe it’s because you can get even weirder ones now, like .tech, .online, .art etc.
I live in a place where tech-companies are still called it-companies in the native tongue over anything else. So maybe it is a local thing that my association is stronger.
Other things I thought I would see more, would be <verb>.it. It is a shame they seem to be in domaim-squat hell.