The UK will hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, what does it mean for .io?

TheGuardian.com reported that after decades of hostility,The UK has agreed to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.

From the article:

The agreement will allow a right of return for Chagossians, whom the UK expelled from their homes in the 1960s and 1970s, in what has been described as a crime against humanity and one of the most shameful episodes of postwar colonialism.

However, there will be an exception for the key island of Diego Garcia, which is home to a joint UK-US military base, and which will remain under UK control. Plans for the base were the reason the UK severed the Chagos Islands from the rest of Mauritius when it granted the latter independence in 1968 and forcibly displaced up to 2,000 people.

There was a mixed reaction to the announcement from Chagossians, not all of whom are happy that sovereignty has been handed to Mauritius.

For some background Wikipedia’s entry on .io states the following:

In 2021, the United Nations’ International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea ruled that the United Kingdom has no sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago, and that sovereignty instead belongs to Mauritius. This would extinguish the British Indian Ocean Territory, and the IO ISO-3166 two-letter country code and .io domain could also be extinguished. The United Kingdom, which was not a party to the case, disputes and does not recognise the tribunal’s decision, so further legal processes are likely.^[ In 2022, the Mauritian government was considering how to progress with the issue. In October 2024, the UK announced that it would hand over sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius once a treaty is finalised.

So if sovereignty belongs to Mauritius what will happen with .io? There is no news on this as of yet but it’s worth keeping an eye on with the handover to Mauritius.