[jessaustin]

The British High Court ruled in 2000 that they could do so, but the government ordered the ruling overturned...

Haha I can think of a few leaders of other nations who might enjoy this power.

Of course I have sympathy for refugees of all sorts. However, although the Chagossians were definitely screwed out of their home, it doesn't follow that they have been screwed out of ".io" money. It is an accident of history that TLDs are relatively scarce, that national governments may extract economic rents from TLDs, that some ccTLDs have no corresponding national government, and that the UK happens to own ".io". Nothing any Chagossian ever did entitles her or her descendants to this money.

In a better world than ours, there would be billions of TLDs, and the value of any one of them would be negligible.

[hackuser]

> although the Chagossians were definitely screwed out of their home, it doesn't follow that they have been screwed out of ".io" money.

Two thoughts:

1) What if the resource from the Chagossians' island was oil and not a domain name; would that be different? Wouldn't your same argument about rents apply?

2) Maybe rents in general are an accident of history, as you say, but why should the UK benefit from this accident and not the Chagossians? If oil was found under your home, would you mind giving the revenue to the UK, since its presence and value is an accident of history?

I agree that the constraint on TLDs is mostly artificial.

[jessaustin]

Again, IANAL, but roughly:

1) Different entirely. First, "mineral rights" are decided in various ways, but one of those is actual possession of the overlying real estate. So, when one's land is stolen, one's valuable mineral resources might also be stolen. The connection between the string "io" and the Chagos Islands is much more tenuous.

2) Not quite what I meant. If ICANN or somesuch were to decide to repossess ".io" from UK and give the proceeds to the Chagos Islands Refugees' Association, I would applaud. Arguably, other displaced and conquered peoples might similarly deserve a TLD. The point is that a process must be followed, and until it is the Chagossians have no particular claim to this or any other alphabetic string.

[CHY872]

This sort of thing leads to finicky rulings everywhere, though. For example, if I build an airport, I probably will have to compulsorily purchase a bunch of land from people and demolish their homes. I must purchase the land at the market price (at least according to UK law) so that they are left in the same financial position after the purchase.

Now say that 50 years later, its realised that there's a whole load of diamonds under the airport (not known to anyone). Clearly, we would not compensate the original owners.

The only difference here is that the people who owned the land were not compensated for it. Those people are now mostly dead or nearly dead.

[13]

We already have thousands of top level domains and it's utterly ridiculous. People with trademarks have an obligation to protect their mark or risk losing it. Depending how you read that, it can involve buying hundreds of different variations on your brand name under different top levels. Some of them even appear to be trying to capitalize on brand protection behavior; companies will feel compelled to purchase .gripe for example to stop it hosting negative content about them.

    $ whois apple.gripe

    Registrant Organization: Apple Inc.
    Registrant Email: [e-mail]

See?

[eli]

shrug

I think it has more to do with Apple not wanting anyone else to own TLDs with its name in it, then due to some legal requirement to register them all. In other words, they'd have done it anyway even if trademarks weren't a concer.

[jessaustin]

IANAL, and I'm not responsible for poor legal advice that I haven't even given. The elimination of stupid corporate lawyer bullshit like this would be but one of the benefits of a non-scarce TLD regime. If keeping a trademark required spending many billions of dollars every year, either firms would make do without trademark, or the law would recognize that "apple.gripe" doesn't mean anything about Apple Computer's trademarks.

[smt88]

Trademarks are useful. They let you know that you're buying from the person you intend to buy from.

Imagine a world without trademarks. The US would be flooded with iPhone knockoffs, and all of them would be identical to iPhones. They'd have god-knows-what inside them, but they'd bear the Apple logo.

Or, imagine you want to pay your American Express bill. Unfortunately, someone has bought AmericanExpress.card, and you get confused. You end up inputting your AmEx login info into a phishing site and give a hacker your personal data.

In a world without trademarks, Apple and American Express wouldn't have the legal authority to pursue people that are imitating them.

[jessaustin]

A) Of course trademark is valuable (to important parties!), that is the premise of the grandparent comment. (So the "...firms would make do without trademark..." clause is a deliberate absurdity.)

B) This anti-phishing idea is security theater. If you teach cardholders that a URL will save them from getting phished, they'll get phished. This is analogous to, though quite a bit worse than, the idea that a logo guarantees authenticity, even in our current regime. (E.g., some of those who thought they had purchased FTDI components were discovered recently to have not done.)

[smt88]

Re: A) You said either trademarks should go away or apple.gripe should become acceptable. Definitely a false dichotomy, but my comment was targeted at either/both of those possibilities.

Re: B) I completely disagree. I frequently visit mail.google.com, and I trust that I'm not getting phished. I'm going purely on the basis of the URL there. I wouldn't feel the same way going to, say, mail.google.me.

In order to trust a URL, you must be sure that your client system isn't compromised (and nothing in between). If it is, you're vulnerable to much worse than phishing. Phishing is likely unnecessary at that point.

It has nothing to do with the URL being secure or insecure. Using web-enabled computers on a daily basis means that we're trusting our systems not to be infected by unknown/undetected malware. We don't have any alternative, so we take the risk.

There are many ways to be slightly more certain that our DNS records haven't been tampered with nowadays, but we're still basically trusting hackable systems all the time.

[13]

In a way short .com domains display some level of financial cost involved in obtaining them. If I saw a website hosted on hexagon.com I'd assume it's probably legitimate just due to the probable expensive of obtaining it being higher than a phisher might be willing to pay.

[fredsted]

I think it's more likely that Apple is simply interested in owning all apple.* domains. You can't predict what domains people are going to purchase (as seen in the latest episode of Last Week Tonight regarding former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg[0])

[0] http://www.amny.com/entertainment/mike-bloomberg-domains-reg...

[CHY872]

> Haha I can think of a few leaders of other nations who might enjoy this power.

In Britain we essentially go by the philosophy that parliament represents the people, and parliament is the highest authority in the country. If the government doesn't like a decision made by a court, the idea is that the law can be changed.

[jessaustin]

There's something appealing about that theory, in that it would seem to stop buck-passing. I just wonder how well my own nation would have done in correcting the Supreme Court. Would we still have some of the awful things we had in the past? Would we we already have some of the great things we'll have in the future?

[sjy]

If Congress does not like the way its legislation is interpreted by the Supreme Court it is free to amend that legislation (and this often happens). It's not so much that the two branches of government have a different relationship in the US and the UK, but rather that in the US there is a special piece of legislation (the Constitution) which can't be amended easily.

[djpowell]

The court decisions weren't overturned by parliament though, they were done by royal prerogative.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_in_Council#United_Kingdom