None of this history is visible from .io, which was assigned to Internet Computer Bureau Ltd, a small company based in Bournemouth, UK, in 1997. Before 1998, the domain name system was administered by Jon Postel at the University of Southern California, and its decisions were not a matter of public record (see the story of .scot for more on the history of DNS). ICB Director Paul Kane is also a DNSSEC “keyholder”, one of seven people around the world entrusted with ensuring the security of the domain name system, who meet in California every few months to reissue the cryptographic codes which keep the web running. (Read James Ball’s article on the keyholders at the Guardian).

Paul Kane has previously described domain names as “national assets” and ICB has been at the forefront of the privatisation of these assets, being the registrar for .ac and .sh, the ccTLDs for the British territories of Ascension Island and St Helena in the South Atlantic, as well as .tm, the ccTLD for the oppressive, autocratic nation of Turkmenistan. Responding to questions from Gigaom in 2014, Kane claimed that “profits are distributed to the authorities for them to operate services as they see fit” and that “Each of the overseas territories has an account and the funds are deposited there because obviously the territories have expenses that they incur and it’s offsetting that.”