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About.so

Monolith Innovations, as a domain name server, was popular in the mid-1990s.
Second-level domain registrations at the time were (by modern standards) relatively expensive. Monolith operated various projects which allowed small sites to obtain an Internet address of the form example.ml.org at effectively no cost instead of paying full price ($50US in the first year) for a domain like example.comexample.org or example.net [4]
The domain name record for .so was initially created on 28 August 1997, at or near the peak of the ml.org service's popularity. At the time, the potential benefits seemed more than apparent. By taking responsibility for a country code domain, Monolith could have become able to issue *.so domains at second-level for little or no cost, providing a viable alternative to the higher Network Solutions pricing of that era.
According to ml.org's founder, Aveek Datta, in 1998, "I've personally been trying to create a global FREE top level domain. Whether or not this becomes a reality is another question; money talks and big bucks are being waved about in the registry battles." [5] However, the ml.org service ceased operations at the end of 1998 due to "technical and organisational problems" which included major server failures.[6] Its second-level domains remain registered to Aveek Datta, president of the former Monolith Innovations Group, but appear not to be in active use.[7] Throughout the domain's history, a one-page placeholder site at the nic.so address claimed that "no .SO domains are available and we are not looking for any registrar partners." [8] [9] However, the DNS servers for the domain name were badly configured,[citation needed] so the nic.so address was only available intermittently.
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