I must say it played a pivotal role in my life, it allowed me to do my passion and have a domain name in my early teens when I couldn't pay for anything. Being able to toy with a domain name led me down many rabbit holes and led to me trying out self-hosting and system administration.
Sad we can't have free things.
https://tamouse.github.io/blog/politics/2019/10/02/why-is-th...
EDIT: it could also be argued that this controversy is beneficial for the Chagossians I guess. I didn't know anything about them until I purchased a .io domain a few years ago.
You can fantasize about the hardships the citizens suffered for the appropriation of the .io TLD and draw any analogy you want, but there are probably more pressing needs of the people you're not addressing by spending time to supply this sort of sympathy.
Worse, imagine a world where you actually advocate for the displaced indigenous people to care about this problem. Probably you'd be asking them to divert attention from real problems such as being able to afford food tomorrow.
But if those TLDs don't even bring them any money and they're not named after something in the Chagossian's own language, do they even own them in any meaningful sense?
Aside from the right to return to their homelands, these people should be given some actual royalties from .io domain purchases. And then maybe also a new TLD that is more meaningfully connected to them and less likely to be hijacked.
Firstly the US never bought into it so all the original successful internet companies are ".coms". For this reason if you are a global company, chances are you would prefer a ".com" to anything else. Most companies want to address a global audience and part of the point of e-commerce is to make this happen. So they don't necessarily want a parochial-seeming national tld but would prefer a global one. This makes country-specific tlds redundant for commerce.
Secondly the people running the national TLDs are (in my experience) often doing so to further their own egos and personal interests and so tend to offer a shitty service. This is why I gave up my ".co.uk" domain some years back. The UK NIC were just annoying in a bunch of different ways.
german people, for example, will trust a business running on a .de domain much more than a .com one.
in most cases it is much preferred for an international company to run the country-specific website on the according ccTLD. companies that "want to address a global audience" are a specific set of companies that might prefer a "global" website, but most businesses will run country specific sites, not "global" sites.
also not sure what the UK NIC being "annoying in a bunch of different ways" has to do with anything, or even means.
seems to me like you are living in your own world, far detached from reality.
The way in which the UK nic used to be annoying that is relevant for this is that they used to make it much harder to register, transfer and renew domains. So at some point even though I had a .co.uk and a .com I just stopped trying to transfer the .co.uk and let it lapse at the next renewal date.
UK transfers are surely more complicated than they have to be (push vs. pull logic).
and I can also see where you're coming from, since in the UK it doesn't seem to be such a big thing.
but in most other non-english speaking countries (or even .com.au or co.nz), ccTLDs are actually a big trust factor. also for example high-end keyworddomains sell for a multiple of the respective .com domain price. sometimes as much as 5-10 times.
.fr and .be are as easy to manage as any other TLD, and they have the advantage that you're probably not going to be price gouged as they are not run for profit.
In Europe they are working very well and are used constantly.
.de is used by most Germans. .fr french, .at etc.
.de has more weight than .net or .com for most people in Germany.
For example our community schools uses a .qa domain and the biggest telecom provider among various other sites.
What you're saying does not apply to all countries.
"Never bought into is" as never bothered and never cared about other countries (main character syndrome)
I’d love to know how/why they’ve managed to keep all of those alive so long. I am very appreciative but equally surprised.
If the way to have there things is defrauding others, then they are not as free as they seem.
I'd say that a third-level domain is fine for teenage projects; was fine for me even past teens.
That wasn’t a concern in 2002 but today it should be.
yep, being a kid iterested in tech and having parents, that are not, is probably a huge pain... internet at home and a computer.. sure... giving your credit card info to your kid for some name on the internet? No way s/he's getting that.
Having a free option (and dynamic dns, and possibly even a free virtual machine somewhere) makes a lot of learning and experimenting possible for kids.
I’d guess that in many cases, being interested in tech might make people _less_ likely to do this.