[deleted]
[deleted]
The dark side of .io
31–40 of 84 posts
Re: The dark side of .io
#32Okay, this is going to be controversial, but I have no problem whatsoever with moving people around like this, as long as: 1) the displaced people are adequately compensated for their loss, and 2) they are given freedom to move to a place where they can enjoy human rights and make an adequate living. The right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates is not a human right. This applies at every scale from a sing…
[deleted]
Re: The dark side of .io
#33Sooo... what? This is easily the third or fourth time this has been linked to in Hacker News. What relevance does it have to anything? Everyone who uses .io domains are horrible, insensitive people? Those who use .me domains should be forever ashamed of the various human rights violations of the Montenegrin government in 1995? Anyone who uses bit.ly is basically insulting the victims of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing? Et…
First time I've seen it. I think it has a lot of relevance, we all need to think more about the things we purchase. That chocolate bar you just ate was probably produced using slave labor, those new cool shoes, made with sweat shop labor by young girls. To just brush off articles like this is insensitive.
That's a bit of a straw man argument. If you read closely, the article says: "The Chagossians are largely descended from African slaves brought to the previously uninhabited islands, 2,200km (1,367 miles) north-east of Mauritius, by the French in the 18th century."
Yes, these unfortunate souls have suffered generations of evil, starting with the slave trade and finish off with being expelled from the island(s). That said, I don't really see the argument that it is somehow their land. Should they have been properly compensated or better yet relocated somewhere with better conditions than what they had? Absolutely! In fact, it seems that a law suite seeking that compensation might have better luck than trying to reclaim the land.
The example used earlier with the Balkans is so much more complicated. Depending on who's side of history you take, all sides have a claim to most of the land in the Balkans. Things seem to be much more clear cut here.
Re: The dark side of .io
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tr…
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 yo…
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.)
Re: The dark side of .io
#35Okay, this is going to be controversial, but I have no problem whatsoever with moving people around like this, as long as: 1) the displaced people are adequately compensated for their loss, and 2) they are given freedom to move to a place where they can enjoy human rights and make an adequate living. The right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates is not a human right. This applies at every scale from a sing…
There's generally a reason why ethnic cleansing is considered an evil thing to do.
Forcibly removing people from their land deprives them of the systems that sustain them: political, economic, cultural. It's a kidnapping and theft rolled into one.
Re: The dark side of .io
#36Okay, this is going to be controversial, but I have no problem whatsoever with moving people around like this, as long as: 1) the displaced people are adequately compensated for their loss, and 2) they are given freedom to move to a place where they can enjoy human rights and make an adequate living. The right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates is not a human right. This applies at every scale from a sing…
> the displaced people are adequately compensated for their loss How can you measure (in order to attempt to "adequately compensate" displaced people) the inability to live in one's ancestral homeland? Imagine if we were all shipped to a somewhat earth-like moon somewhere, under "eminent domain".
"As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system. And regrettably, your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you."
Re: The dark side of .io
#37It is surreal reading this. The geographic connections between ccTLDs and their associated 2-letter pairs with their English connotations are completely arbitrary . ICANN could have just as easily decided to issue all 26*26 two-letter TLDs according to some other scheme.
It's not completely arbitrary, it's mostly based on ISO 3166 which is in turn derived from the names of countries. So on the contrary, it was a very deliberate assignment of two letter codes to territories.
If the islanders had not been forcibly displaced in the 1960s, they would most probably have been had some say in the governance of .io, as other British overseas territories have done for their respective domains.
Re: The dark side of .io
#38Okay, this is going to be controversial, but I have no problem whatsoever with moving people around like this, as long as: 1) the displaced people are adequately compensated for their loss, and 2) they are given freedom to move to a place where they can enjoy human rights and make an adequate living. The right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates is not a human right. This applies at every scale from a sing…
1) the displaced people are adequately compensated for their loss
The occupier always has bigger guns, more power, and no opposition from a third party. They don't need to compensate.
2) they are given freedom to move to a place where they can enjoy human rights and make an adequate living.
Still a world full of refugees being smuggled into countries as illegal immigrant because what countries will accept them?
The only people who are moved and given (1) or (2) are ones that have a sufficiently good BATNA.
"This is going to be controversial" --- I'd say so. I almost thought it was a troll.
Re: The dark side of .io
#39Okay, this is going to be controversial, but I have no problem whatsoever with moving people around like this, as long as: 1) the displaced people are adequately compensated for their loss, and 2) they are given freedom to move to a place where they can enjoy human rights and make an adequate living. The right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates is not a human right. This applies at every scale from a sing…
I think these are valuable points; thanks. But I disagree for a few reasons: 1) Eminent domain seems valid if it's exercised by the victims' legitimate government, which they elect and over which they have a say, and under which they have rights and the ability to legally protect themselves. My impression[1] is that none of that applies to the Chagossians. The UK appears[1] to have taken advantage of their helplessne…
I appreciate your criticisms.
1) I'm not disputing that it was wrong for UK to evict the Chagossians. I'm only disputing that the Chagossians have some sort of fundamental human right to return all these years later, just because their grandfathers used to live there.
2) Yes, many leading philosophers of previous centuries used to think very highly of property rights, but this trend has greatly diminished in the last 50 years or so, especially in Anglo-American political philosophy.
In any case, I'm pretty sure that if I offered a significant premium over the prevailing market price, most people will be happy to sell their home and move elsewhere. Especially if I also offered to cover their cost of moving and lost wages while they look for a new job. (That's roughly what I think every government should offer when they need to relocate people.)
3) I totally agree. It was wrong for the UK to move them without their consent. But what is done is done, and now it's time to ask what to do about it.
If I break your phone, property rights mean that you have the right to make me compensate for your material losses. It doesn't mean that you have the right to make me restore your broken phone to its original condition, no matter how much sentimental value it might have had for you.
4) That's a genuine problem. If it is impossible to ensure an equal or greater quality of life for the relocated population, perhaps that's a good reason not to relocate them in the first place. On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that a country like UK would be unable to arrange a fantastic life (at least materially) for a few hundred islanders no matter where in the world they were. They were simply unwilling to do it, just as they were unwilling to consult the locals before deciding to lease Chagos to the Americans.
tl;dr: Something very bad happened. But making it right is not simply a matter of resetting HEAD to a previous commit.
Re: The dark side of .io
#40The 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…
> 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…
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.