The main problem which people seem to have is that their domain name registrar decides to pull their domain. Luckily, there is ample competition in this space, my place of employment included, which should make it reasonable to pick a place which 1. doesn’t do that and 2. has reasonable real-live-person support.

Of course, if the registry (i.e. the TLD) wants your domain gone, you are out of luck whatever you do. If this is a concern then you should pick a TLD with what you consider reasonable management. There are a lot of ccTLDs and gTLDs to choose from.

Therefore, what you absolutely shouldn’t do is to pick whatever domain registrar is either cheapest or largest, and pick whatever domain name which happens to look cool and be available. Both are recipies for potential disaster.

Indeed. I am curious to see what comes out of attempts at decentralizing this such as Handshake[0] and ENS[1]. I think I saw something similar with prominent backers come up here on HN the other week but can't recall it now. Namecoin[2] was very early on this.

[0]: https://www.namebase.io/

[1]: https://ens.domains/

[2]: https://bit.namecoin.org/