Mauritius challenges UK rights over Indian Ocean domain name

Officials raised the Mauritian flag above an atoll on the Chagos Islands, pictured, and sang the national anthem in a ceremony in February. Photograph: Bruno Rinvolucri/The Guardian

The right to license lucrative online domain names favoured by cryptocurrency firms has become the latest battlefield in the escalating dispute between Mauritius and the UK over ownership of the Chagos Islands.

The two letter address .io, which stands for Indian Ocean, is allocated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (Iana) to the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). It is operated by a commercial firm nominally based in Diego Garcia, the largest of the Chagos islands and home to a US military base.