The University of Malta was awarded authority by IANA in 1992 for .mt, the top-level country domain for Malta. At that time the University delegated responsibility to a committee constituted for the purpose whose activities included:

• creation and implementation of a domain naming policy for .mt;

• maintenance of the .mt nameservers;

• promotion of the .mt domain;

• registration of new domain names.

Subsequently the University invested the committee with a formal status as Malta Internet Foundation, also known as NIC(Malta), which was officially inaugurated in January 1999.

With respect to domain registration and maintenance, NIC(Malta) plays a similar role to that assumed by network information centres in other countries, such as Nominet(UK) and DENIC(Germany).