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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

This is why I always say you should think twice when choosing a ccTLD if you don’t have a presence there. Not every registry has the same uptime as Verisign.

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Given the amount of past outages of ccTLDs we've seen (almost none), i'd say this problem is negligible and nothing to worry about.

There is one very recent exception however, the russian plans to partly separate from the internet shortly (especially regarding DNS) could well be an issue.

Technical and legal issues that cause issues for customers at small ccTLDs are not uncommon. It all depends on who is running the registry. Try "cctld hijacked" and "cctld downtime" in your favorite search engine for a dozen or so examples.

Registries range in resources from "highly experienced billion-dollar organizations", to literally "we have a guy who updates the zone file in notepad", and they range in legal environment from, "functional democratic state with well-established judiciary" to "our government was violently overthrown this week".

Whether or not the problem is negligible depends on your particular use-case. For some, it might be a good choice, for others, it might not be.

Like I have said before¹²: Neither your registrar nor your chosen TLD registry should be in the habit of suspending domains at the drop of a hat, or be at risk of going out of business suddenly. If you mostly trust your local government, your national ccTLD should suffice. In fact, it should be your default choice unless you have strong indications it does not fulfill the above criteria.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29108933

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21614298

And yet to my knowledge this has never happened before.

Didn't .io ( which is a crime against humanity to boot) go down for a few hours a few years ago?

No idea. I was referring to .fj

Why do you say .io is a crime against humanity?

.io is the TLD for the British Indian Ocean Territory, which is associated with the forced displacement of the Chagos islander people to make room for the Diego Garcia military base, amongst others. The British unilaterally decided to detach the Chagos archipelago from Mauritius before it got independent, which the deported people say (not without reason) is a crime against their human rights.

To back that up - the Chagosian claim is backed by the UK and rulings at the International Court of Justice. The UN supports Mauritius' claim to the territory.

Even besides the literal crimes against humanity, the .io domain really doesn't need to exist - what with the British Indian Ocean Territory having no permanent population and really not being a country at all.

"Being a country" isn't the criteria for the ISO code or domain.

Consider AQ, TW, GG, SJ, EH, HK and many others.

TW is a controversial inclusion in your list.

Several of them are controversial to someone.

AQ is controversial to countries who want to exploit Antarctica's natural resources.

TW is controversial to China.

GG is controversial where it's used for tax evasion etc.

EH to Morocco, HK to the UK/China.

Yes. https://hackernoon.com/stop-using-io-domain-names-for-produc...

Also there were some comments from the owner at the time that I thought were pretty unprofessional about it, too.

Maybe not, but it is predicable that the quality and quantity of resources and governance available to a registry has an impact on their operations.

I vividly remember .de being offline causing trouble for a couple of hours in 2010.

https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/12/germany_top_level_dom...

It's too late to edit my comment, but I was referring to .fj, not ccTLD's in general.

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