So why is .ml TLD going back to Mali taking everyone by surprise?
So why is .ml TLD going back to Mali taking everyone by surprise?
Was there some sort of assurance that nothing was going to happen when the contract expired, and this expectation was changed? Freenom hasn't been registering domains since Jan 1.
It's seeming a little odd to me that this is catching people with their pants down.
Actually, I think it's amusingly perfect that the tankies were hyperfocused on conjectural threats posed by capitalists and entirely missed the much more imminent threat posed by a government.
Very true. I had to laugh when I saw lemmygrad.com
lemmygrad.com is just a redirect to exploding-heads.com which is just another extremist instance at the other end of the spectrem.
What is a tankie? First time I’m seeing it today.
From wikipedia
Tankie is a pejorative label for communists and those who align with Marxism–Leninism ideology. More generally, the term "tankie" has been applied for those who express support for one-party socialist republics that are associated with Marxism–Leninism, whether contemporary or historical.
They usually praise communism and ignore the flaws and horrible practices of things like the U.S.S.R
A tankie is a communist who at least defends and often advocates for forced submission to their rule, or more broadly defends the authoritarian regimes that engage in such. It dates back to the USSR sending in tanks to crush an uprising in Hungary in 1956, and was applied to the UK communists who argued in support of the USSR.
The owners of lemmy.ml are tankies.
Someone who drives tanks to work
It's very irregular for a country to take back top level domains. Even refusing to renew registrations is unheard of.
ML, tk, etc broke ground by offering free country code TLDs starting 10 years ago. This was possible until Meta sued Freenom this year for issuing domains to the majority of all sources phishing traffic.
Basically, the internet got used to getting TLDs for free, and that was great, except the issuers of said domains (African countries with not a lot of money) have no obligation and no incentive to keep doing that forever. Especially after it became a liability.
Is it? Because pretty much every ccTLD is owned by their given country. They have all rights over it, but some registrars took it to themselves to issue those domains on the countries' behalf, that probably didn't even know about it way back.
Free TLDs may have been great for hobbyists, but also great for spammers, phishers and other unlawful activities. And as usual, the bad bunch killed a good thing.
If you want a good TLD, use a generic one (org, name, space, etc.) or use a ccTLD that represented by your own country.
Wouldn’t be surprised if they had a monetary incentive provided by a company cough Meta to do so.
Edit: or leaked user info as an incentive.
Basically, the internet got used to getting TLDs for free
That's a very general statement.
From the context of the other two paragraphs, you can narrow down what I meant. Stripped of context it is general, yes.
Not all country code top level domains were free, just a select few. And not everyone used free TLDs, just people with tight budgets who weren't expecting to make money on their sites, as well as scammers and people who wanted to stay anonymous for other reasons.
When's the last time you saw a government sieze a TLD?
That's highly disengenous, they didn't seize the tld, they own it. They just didn't renew the operator's contract.
.ga earlier this year I believe
They didn’t seize it. .ml TLD was contracted for 10 years to some Dutch dude. That contract expired on the 17th
No, the Freenom registrar (the Dutch dude) had a contract to issue .ml domains for 10 years. That expired. Other registrars can register .ml domains without issue, as long as their contracts with the government remain.
You mean the country that owns and has always owned .ml TLD, which states rules you must follow if you want to register a domain with that TLD, which states the penalties which include forfiet of your domain name, surpised people when they did what they said they would do?
This is kind of interesting to see how the public views ownership. There seems to be an assumption that buying xyz.com is akin to buying a utility (we pay for water service to drink and drown or waterboard). This ain't it. A domain name is a registration in a database on servers that need to be constantly online, it had costs, it has governance concerns and technical infrastructure that must be maintained. There isn't a higher power here, no government owns the internet, but some governments do own their own TLDs. This makes it possible to have mali.ml vs visitbeautifulmali420.squarespace.com. It might feel like you have the power to buy fuckmali.ml and put turn it into goatse but mali can nuke your registration if they wanted to. How did these countries get the TLDs? ICANN. But don't think ICANN is going to jump in and break their rules for you.
This sucks but ICANN has a solution.. there are many many TLDs out there now. They all work the same: it's just a name, point it where you go and it works like any .com or .org. or whatever. Fun ones like .zip and .xxx. grab one you like but be sure to read the rules when registering. Some TLDs do NOT allow private registration. Most country based TLDs (ccTLDs) require that you live in that country and provide proof of citizenship.
This has been around since the inception of the internet. There are alternatives to ICANN, but I am not positive you will want to use them because:
- your visitors will need to use these alternatives on all devices or on the router in order to access your site.
- legit domain holders may not have records on these alternate services but malicious actors might. If we change the IP to a malicious actor for apple servers at the DNS level because the TLDs arent using the root-servers.net, anyone using those TLD root servers could easily be hacked.
It's not great, but ICANN starts the chain of trust upon which the internet relies.
Why is lemmy.ml still running, though?
Nobody really knows, but there are two theories floating around:
- The Lemmy devs paid for their domain
- Their DNS entries are still cached and it will stop working tomorrow
Permanently Deleted
Why is it surprising that a ccTLD is reclaimed by their own designated country? Same with .vu and .tk
vu: https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/vu.html
Both .tk and .vu are free to use by anyone with minimal restrictions. Paid .tk & .vu domains have no restrictions
A contract expiring and not being renewed is nothing unusual. But it doesn't automatically mean revocation of all domain names. If A gives B a contract to manage resources and you as C sign a contract with B who is acting in the name A, it doesn't automatically dissappear if A and B break their arrangement.
Any lawyers to pitch in to confirm if works like that?
It's common courtesy and maybe a legal obligation to announce such intentions.
C didn't sign a contract with B. B let C use A's property for free while B was managing it. The only contract was between A and B for managing their property.
Using a free TLD for anything you wanted to stick around was a terrible idea in the first place.
I'm not a lawyer, but that depends on the contract between A and B.
You can't prevent a country from revoking all ccTLD domains, if that is what they want to do. Mali probably doesn't care about the contract, but even if they do, they can just make a new law, any country can claim domains that break their laws.
The even bigger/more hilarious part of this IMO is how millions of emails meant to go to the US defense department - .mil - ended up going to Mali - .ml - because of typos. The Dutch company that up til now managed .ml has been trying to get the military to respond but no luck, and I think they had to hand everything over to Mali — which is closely aligned w Russia…
For anyone looking for alternatives, I think this list is the most up to date: https://free-for.life/#/?id=domains
Ah nice. I used to use them ages ago. Nice to see the service still exists.
Wonder when .co will go back to Colombia?
There was also news today about a change in Mali that affected US military emails that were sent to .ml instead of .mil. I didn't read the whole article so I don't know if that was real or clickbait.
It was real, but totally unrelated to this.
Thanks.
Yea...
