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Sunday 1 March 2015

Mali Gives Millions of Malaysians a New Internet Identity

African nation shakes up Malaysian website industry with free domains.

Mali, one of the largest countries in West Africa, has introduced the .ML domain name registry in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, as a new Malaysian domain extension. AGETIC, the governmental agency responsible for Mali's public infrastructure, is using new technologies to offer domain name registrations to all individuals and businesses in Malaysia at no cost.

"We have introduced a new .ML domain platform to internet users in Mali two years ago. With the introduction of free internet domain names and a modern platform, we instantly became the fastest growing country code top level domain in Africa.” says Mr. Moussa Dolo, the Managing Director of AGETIC. "Over the last year we have seen a large increase of registrations from Malaysian users. We did our research and found out that the ML extension is popular in Malaysia, as it is an abbreviation of the country name. That is why we decided to create a special registration offering for the Malaysian market."

Every nation in the world receives a two letter abbreviation from the International Standard Organization (ISO), and in that process the ML code was associated with Mali. Malaysia's historical MY domain name is found to be hard to register. Registration is expensive, requires paperwork and has bureaucratic rules preventing Malaysian individuals and businesses to register MY domains quickly. With the introduction of .ML as the free new MaLaysian domain, AGETIC offers a solution that addresses the demand for domains for the 20 million internet users in Malaysia.

The introduction of ML in Malaysia comes directly after the ICANN conference in Singapore. During this meeting of the international internet governance body, African participation in the international internet community was high on the agenda. With the introduction of ML domains in Malaysia, Mali is the first African country that looks abroad for domain name distribution.

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