Telegram’s core domain t.me has been placed on serverHold at the .me registry, effectively removing it from global DNS and rendering all t.me links inaccessible.
The change occurred today, according to domain records. As of now, there has been no official explanation from Telegram, the .me registry, or backend operator Identity Digital.
A serverHold is a registry-level status that completely dead-ends the domain, preventing it from resolving anywhere in the world.
The .me top level domain is nominally the TLD for the country of Montenegro, but in practice, it gets used more for its English meaning rather than for that country. The same thing happens with Tuvalu’s .tv TLD.
They are theoretically making mountains of cash from the situation however
Theoretically, yes. But .me domains are pretty cheap, ~10$/year from Joker and likely even cheaper elsewhere.
It adds up for Tuvalu with the .tv TLD. $10m for a country with a GDP of $65m is no joke.
15% of GDP just from TLD is wild. But they have only ~10k people there, so makes sense that their GDP isn’t really high.
Montenegro is ‘a bit’ bigger country by GDP, so for them it’s a lot closer to rounding error.
To my knowledge, they peered with other registrars and hosts to manage the vending. At least, in 2008 ish they partnered almost exclusively with Apple (for their MobileMe cloud and email services issuing everyone dotME addresses) and GoDaddy. I think others had to resell somehow through them? But I could be mistaken on that detail.
Domain squatting was a very profitable scourge on the internet back before all the obvious names were brought up , but it was one of the few popular TLD’s to gain any real traction with consumers until dotAI.
I very briefly held, and did nothing with, “pants.me” which I regret to this day.
A lot of ccTLDs get used outside their countries because they’re cheap too.
I’ve got a .pw name (Palau) because it was only 11$.
I got a .wang because it’s a .wang.
.pw stands for Professional Web™!