this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Could they not just go with ".mali" as their governtal extension? It's only two more characters. Why mess with all of the existing .ml stuff on the internet?
The country codes are an ISO standard. IANA uses these for country TLDs, they don't set the standard.
Each country (well, actually an organisation in the country, usually a part of the government) gets its ISO-2 code (the two-letter code it is usually known by). So .ml has always belonged to the Mali government. For a time, they let a Dutch company run it, and the company allowed pretty much anyone to create .ml websites for free. At this time, the Lemmy software was created and its developers also started lemmy.ml as a test server. Anyway, the Dutch registrar's contract has ended and the .ml domain will now return to the Mali government. So the existing .ml stuff always existed in a domain that belonged to Mali; it is just that they are only now being asked to leave.
Country top level domains are 2 characters, with exception to UK having .co.uk most countries have like JP for Japan and CN for China