[judge2020]

I posted this elsewhere a while ago but it's relevant to opennic, let me know if something is out-of-date or wrong:

The choice to support DNS roots like .oz, .ku, .te, .ti, and .uu is not standards-compliant. Say suddenly a new nation comes into the world and ISO assigns them one of these abbreviations, or one of these “emerging countries” they have TLDs for gets assigned a different cctld, what does opennic do? They made the choice to pre-register a bunch of domains under these reserved 2-letter country codes, so now they either have to

A. stop being able to say “we directly support all ICANN-assigned tlds” and keep resolving the existing domains

or

B. say to the existing domain owners of [their artificial] tld “sorry to be you” as their domain names they thought they owned now become registered to other entities.

[SpicyLemonZest]

The implicit goal of a project like OpenNIC is to eventually get a seat at the standards compliance table, where they'll be able to convince decisionmakers not to make those assignments in the first place.

For now they do (B). They renamed their .free domain to .libre after ICANN registered .free.

[echelon]

Why don't they purchase gTLDs?

[SpicyLemonZest]

They're ideologically opposed to ICANN's authority over gTLD registration, so even if they could afford to I don't think they'd want to.

[judge2020]

I imagine the cost is too much for them or for any business to sponsor them unless it's by a FAANG-level company. $125k is the cost for gTLDs, and 2-letter TLDs can't be bought.