I asked this as a comment on my previous post, but I still have some questions. 1: If ML stands for Mali and they’re not from Mali, then why would they represent a foreign country? 2: Since it’s not Mali, what does the ML stand for? If it’s a pair of letters, it represents a country or stands for two words. Machine Learning? McCartney Lennon? Mega Lemmy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ml
It’s Mali. Period.
Just because someone registers a domain to host a website from Mali doesn’t mean they represent Mali. Tonga sells domains to anyone with the .to extension, which are used by many torrent sites because Tonga doesn’t care much about respecting piracy laws elsewhere.
You’re reading way too much into it.
I’ve always hated that about DNS, I think it should have been more governed. For example with .gov, well .gov from the first point.
.govshouldn’t be anything really except for like UN or something. It shouldn’t imply US.- US should be
.us.gov, or Australiaau.gov. - Ohio then should be
ohio.us.gov - Akron of course
akron.ohio.us.gov - and then logically all things like if you wanted to email the treasurer of Akron, Ohio it would be
treasurer@akron.ohio.us.gov.
instead we have crazy domains like akronohio.gov. I mean, just the wild west of domains out here. It could have been so organized, people
Given my username, I was naturally very surprised as I read through your example. (Totally agree btw, but that would make too much sense)
Wait really? I swear I didn’t read your username I just randomly picked Akron!
Why isn’t there another domain that they could have used so it doesn’t look like they’re from Mali?
Price.
The more common the tld (.com and .net for example are often double the price of many others) the more expensive it is to keep that domain registered.
It is a cheap tld.
Top level? I’ve only seen it here, so it’s more like buried at the bottom.
it’s the national domain of the country Mali
It’s the Mali top level domain. The devs were just originally looking for a cheap domain to use.
Though I would expect they purposefully looked for one that let them have a dual-meaning, since the .ml also stands for Marxist-Leninist, as the devs are big Russia, China, and North Korea supporters.
And by “cheap” we mean literally free in some cases.
Mali’s government was letting Freenom manage it. So it was a free domain name like .tk, with all the problems that entails with misuse.
Tagging you @favrion because no one seems to have mentioned this, and I think it answers your question.
It means whatever you want it to mean. Go wild!
