| HN Mirror

ccTLD (2 characters, are usually managed by countries, except for .eu and maybe a handful of other exceptions) *do not* follow ICANN’s rules. Governments are owners of the TLD of their own country, and set the administrative rules. On the admin side, you’re trusting the countries to not change the rules against you. It’s probably not a good idea to rent a .ru if you’re Ukrainian for example. You’re also trusting them regarding a part of the DNS resolution: a DNS query first goes by the root DNS, which will resolve the TLD to the registry’s DNS server, which will resolve the domain to the registrar’s DNS servers, which will do the rest. The registry could theoretically override your records on their layers. So same thing, don’t use a ccTLD you don’t trust (that’s true of all TLDs, but even more for ccTLDs). On a technical side, some countries have crappy infrastructures, so resolution is at risk. It happened to Notion a few months ago with their .so domain (Somalia). Some poor countries delegate the technical side of operations to more reliable registries.

Google is safer because it only manages gTLDs. They can set part of the rules, but not all the rules. They have to follow ICANN’s rules. In particular, the dispute process goes through the ICANN which gives a somewhat neutral safety net. It’s far from perfectly, probably not even good enough, but still gives you more warranties than using a random ccTLD.

Speculators bought newGTLDs in the hope of selling tons of them but often dramatically failed. Registering a gTLD to the ICANN costs at least $400,000 if I remember well, so a lot of crappy newGTLDs are not profitable. When the registry goes bankrupt, I don’t know what happens to the customers. My guess is the ICANN tried to re-sell the TLD management on auction, and if they fail, then people would lose their domain. Very few newGTLDs succeeded, I’d stick with these and not try anything fun but too exotic.