[halfcat]

Definitely due to trademark disputes and political pressure.

Substitute “criminal activity” with “someone with power that doesn’t like what you’re doing”.

Consider the eBay stalking scandal [1] and ask if those doing the stalking would be willing to bribe or coerce someone to seize the blogger’s domain.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal

[commandersaki]

Definitely due to trademark disputes and political pressure.

Trademark makes sense, ICANN has a whole program around that: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/trademark-infringement...

As for political pressure, do we have any examples?

Consider the eBay stalking scandal [1] and ask if those doing the stalking would be willing to bribe or coerce someone to seize the blogger’s domain.

Has ICANN (or registry) ever been bribed or coerced? I understand a low quality registrar can, and can possibly take over a domain, but there is recourse (and punishment such as loss of registrar status) around these situations. I would of course avoid these micronation tlds and stick to well established tlds like com/net/org.

[halfcat]

> Has ICANN (or registry) ever been bribed or coerced?

Not that I know of. But it would be quite remarkable for an organization with a global choke point to resist attempts at influence indefinitely.

The upstream comment correctly mentioned owning a domain name being insufficient to be unbannable. There’s no mechanism with owning a domain, or DNS, that’s able to be defended by an individual (nothing like encryption, for example). It’s just someone with more power that allows it, until they don’t.