Earlier this month, the United Kingdom set in motion a minor geopolitical change that, thanks to a weird bit of internet cause-and-effect, could force many Silicon Valley companies to rename their websites.

The British government handed over control of the Indian Ocean's Chagos Islands to Mauritius on Oct. 3 -- a move that Britain's Foreign Secretary described as a bid to secure the long-term existence of Diego Garcia, a military base in the archipelago that gives British and American troops a foothold in the region. The UK-Mauritius deal will also support the return of displaced Chagossians to the Chagos Islands half a century after they were forced out by the US and UK in what Human Rights Watch has deemed a crime against humanity.

Yet the change in sovereignty could also have knock-on effects in the world of tech. The British Indian Ocean Territory (as the UK has designated the Chagos Islands) administers the .io website domain name, which has taken on outsized significance among software developers because I/O is techie parlance for Input/Output, or the process by which a computer responds to input (like from a human) with machine-generated output.

Because of that, startup founders sometimes register their websites under .io (rather than, say, .com or .net) to give it a little extra oomph. The Verge reports that thousands of tech firms, including many crypto ones, use the domain.