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.

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.

According to WHOIS, lemmy.ml is a paid domain so I don't think it will not suffer the same faith as FMHY.ml.

When's the last time you saw a government sieze a TLD?

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?

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

tk: https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/tk.html

ml: https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/ml.html

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.

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

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.

Yea...