Rightly so - don't peruse country-specific TLDs for your app or service vanity BS. This especially concerns .io!
I wouldn't be surprised if many were in the same boat. Registrars should probably warn if buying a ccTLD.
The resulting arrangement would virtually certainly be something like Tuvalu and .tv. Nobody is suggesting that they go into a Freenom-style domain mess like .ml and a few other domains (which some countries decided to just give away for free).
But if you choose .io, you're gambling on the future of your internet property in a way that the owners of traditional domains like .com simply don't have to worry about.
What if someone decides to start a media campaign for divestiture of .io domains? It's not particularly likely, but it's a risk to weigh against the benefits of a cool domain.
Why?
So if Mali confiscates a TLD “rightly so” seems like an unreasonable response. “This is a warning to all of us” makes sense however.
Other sovereigns -- hopefully one of them counts you as a citizen and involves you in its processes through democracy -- can simply boycott, or embargo them, or dissuade them through diplomacy, or armed forces. Unless you understand this, you don't have a good model of what "the Government of Mali" means, and thus it doesn't make sense to make business with "the Government of Mali".
[1] Well, except maybe to the people of Mali, or the constitution of Mali, but that's an internal "implementation detail" that's abstracted away from you, unless you're a citizen of Mali.
That said, from what I understand, ccTLDs are owned by countries they are allocated to (maybe with some corner cases, but irrelevant here), so Mali is certainly not doing anything wrong even in the above "legal" sense by asserting their ownership.
A country-associated TLD should host personal, commercial and governmental services / representations for entities operating out of this country.
If you provide something, a custom TLD like .service .shop .framework is more appropriate.
The ones like .eth or .bit are a bad joke. If you want something that's truly yours, generate a .onion.
"Use an .onion" is genuinely better advice. (I wouldn't do that either, but an .onion at least has a reason to exist.)
It's leaking out into normal DNS.
No, it isn't. I'd never seen a .eth link anywhere on the normal web, yet I've seen plenty of Gemini:// urls, just to throw in something niche for comparison.
You've discovered network effects in the the wild!
Are there really millions of people who use the ENS? Do you have a source?
I have no dog in this fight, I'm just curious.
How many of those aren't the owner?
How many of those aren't bots?
(Flip those last two questions as you'd like; I wasn't sure which would be more illuminating.)
If by nobody you mean "no one outside of the mainstream", sure. But I don't need a lot of work to have my .eth domain resolving to an IPFS file, and there are browser extensions that will let you query ethereum blockchain and use it to resolve IP addresses based on ENS.
A lot of them clearly have value, as the "desirable" eth domains sell for thousands of dollars.
> "Use an .onion" is genuinely better advice. (I wouldn't do that either, but an .onion at least has a reason to exist.)
You seem to be extremely biased against anything related to cryptocurrencies
As for numbers:
> In April 2023, Brave Browser reported 57.27 million monthly active users.
> There are more than 21 million monthly active users of Metamask.