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
What is a tankie? First time I’m seeing it today.
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.
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.
Basically, the internet got used to getting TLDs for free
That’s a very general statement.
When’s the last time you saw a government sieze a TLD?
They didn’t seize it. .ml TLD was contracted for 10 years to some Dutch dude. That contract expired on the 17th
I learned about it from the reports that too many people were sending top secret information to .ml domains instead of their official .mil counterparts.
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
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…
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
Wonder when .co will go back to Colombia?
Yea…
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.
