.so is the internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Somalia. After a long absence, the .so domain was officially relaunched on November 1, 2010, by .SO Registry, which is regulated by the nation's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. It was launched through various accredited registrars around the world. On 11 July 2013 the ISO 3166-1 code for Somalia changed to reflect the SO used for the ccTLD. On July 8, 2015, the .so ccTLD registry was transferred to the Somali Network Information Center (SONIC), which introduced new limitations on purchasing .so domain names by persons and organizations not affiliated with Somalia. As a result, several registrars suspended the registration of new .so domain names. On March 9, 2018, Somalia's newly established telecom regulator The National Communications Authority (NCA) took full control of the country's top-level internet domain (dotSO) from the Somali National Information Center (SONIC) and Cloudy Registry, who ran the operations and the management of the domain Registry. History Overview Due to the civil war in Somalia, operations of this domain were previously officially delegated to Monolith Innovation Group, a company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is now defunct. The domain remained delegated to this company, even though it was defunct, until April 17, 2009, at which time the .so domain record was changed in the root zone to point to the servers of the new registry operator, the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications in Somalia. The demise of Monolith (ml.org) 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.com, example.org or example.net 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