Last Monday, July 17, the term of the contract under which the Dutch company Freenom performed the functions of the registry of the national domain Mali .ML expired. This piece of news was reported by the Domain Incite, referring to the words of the Freenom CEO Joost Zuurbier. The company is famous for its, to put it mildly, liberal attitude towards the domain abuse in the zones it manages, the largest of which is the Tokelau ccTLD .TK. Not long ago, the Gabon authorities terminated Freenom's contract to manage the country's ccTLD .GA, emphasizing that the registry had damaged Gabon's reputation due to the high level of spam activity and other illegal activities associated with names in the .GA.
In the case of Mali, there were no loud statements, Zuurbier stated only that the contract had expired and it would not be extended. But this situation has another interesting aspect. The point is the similarity of the .ML and .MIL. The second one is the official domain of the US armed forces. Joost Zuurbier said that shortly after the company received the rights to manage the country code for Mali, he reserved the names navy.ml and army.ml. And over 10 years, more than 100,000 messages addressed to various US military structures have come to the email addresses associated with them. Message senders simply inadvertently typed .ML instead of .MIL in the address.
According to Zuurbier, there are no military secrets in these letters. However, some of them still contain quite sensitive information related, for example, to funding issues, the health status of military personnel, travel routes for senior officers, etc. This problem can become quite acute, given that Mali maintains warm relations with the Russian Federation. The Pentagon is hardly interested in such letters to end up in the hands of representatives of the Russian Federation.
According to Joost Zuurbier, throughout the 10 years of managing the .ML, he repeatedly appealed to the military and diplomats from the United States with a request to pay attention to the situation and take measures to solve it, but this was never done. However, representatives of the Pentagon in response indicate that sending mail to addresses in the .ML from any network structures of the Ministry of Defense has long been blocked. And to prevent the sending of letters from any other addresses is simply not in the power of the military.
