Mali was giving them away for free, so that’s probably the main reason. I’m a bit confused they just cut them off rather than offering people to start paying for their domains, but oh well.
For the Lemmy devs specifically there’s the added novelty that ML is a common abbreviation for Marxism-Leninism.
According to a news article about US MIL emails being accidentally sent to ML addresses due to misspellings, there was apparently a contractor in charge of the ML TLD, whose 10(?)-year contract was up the other day, I think, or will be soon. With Mali taking direct control over it, presumably they have their own ideas how to manage it. Why they wouldn’t or couldn’t have had the contractor do it (charge for domains) a long time ago, I have no idea. Doesn’t seem like something that would have to be postponed until the contract was over, but obviously I have no insight into the details of the matter.
I guess it might just be easier in the end. There are a lot of spam domains registered on .ml, so going through it all and trying to reach out to owners would be one hell of a job for a presumably already strained Mali bureaucracy. Taking it all down (which they have the right to) and potentially allowing people to buy the domains back from the government later on is probably a lot less work.
Mali was giving them away for free, so that’s probably the main reason. I’m a bit confused they just cut them off rather than offering people to start paying for their domains, but oh well.
For the Lemmy devs specifically there’s the added novelty that ML is a common abbreviation for Marxism-Leninism.
According to a news article about US MIL emails being accidentally sent to ML addresses due to misspellings, there was apparently a contractor in charge of the ML TLD, whose 10(?)-year contract was up the other day, I think, or will be soon. With Mali taking direct control over it, presumably they have their own ideas how to manage it. Why they wouldn’t or couldn’t have had the contractor do it (charge for domains) a long time ago, I have no idea. Doesn’t seem like something that would have to be postponed until the contract was over, but obviously I have no insight into the details of the matter.
I guess it might just be easier in the end. There are a lot of spam domains registered on .ml, so going through it all and trying to reach out to owners would be one hell of a job for a presumably already strained Mali bureaucracy. Taking it all down (which they have the right to) and potentially allowing people to buy the domains back from the government later on is probably a lot less work.