Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnulinux | Hacker News Reader

Because TLD is the property of a sovereign. A sovereign that does not report to the US Government. For US business to use their property as their face to the world (such as pm.me) they need to understand and accept that they're putting their business fate in the hands of a sovereign. Things like OP (X Government takes back .xy TLD) happen, people need to pay attention to power, and geopolitics.

View on HN

That may be a good reason for a company to avoid certain TLDs but it certainly doesn’t make it right for a government to just cancel a legitimate business.

So if Mali confiscates a TLD “rightly so” seems like an unreasonable response. “This is a warning to all of us” makes sense however.

What does "sovereign" mean to you?

Do you understand that there is no such thing as "illegal" in international "law"? Sovereigns can literally do anything, and everything, and absolutely everything they want. So it is "right", maybe not ethically, but certainly legally. "The Government of Mali" does not report to anyone [1], so there is no institution to rule this as wrong, or a human process that can overrule the decision.

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.

Strictly speaking you are right, but people commonly use "illegal" as "in violation of international treaties". Since there's no super-national sovereign to enforce those, it's not the same sort of illegal as we usually mean, but it is functionally close.

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.

Among other reasons, this is why.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com