Ask HN: How to know which TLDs are “safe”?

I've been looking to register a new domain and while all the good stuff is taken on the popular TLDs like .com and many others, there are a lot of great lesser-used TLDs that seem attractive, but I don't know how to gauge the safety/security/durability of these as I think I've read that there are different owners/systems for different TLDs (Google is often mentioned here as an "owner" of some that it uses for questionable purposes). Is there a way to get some accurate and easy-to-interpret info on if a TLD is "ok" (for lack of a better word) ?

I was burned years ago by an attractive TLD where its owners raised the yearly renewals to like $150 from the original $30 without anything I could do about it, so I had to either give it up (which I did) or just eat the fees. So I'd like to know which TLDs are also immune to that sort of thing.