Comment by mholt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mholt | Hacker News Reader

I've said it before [0-4], I'll say it again -- mind your TLD. They have about as much control and influence over your traffic as a VPN, except even your users are at their mercy. Do not choose a TLD based on trends.

[0]: https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1686148772831846402 "TLDs are almost as bad as VPNs in terms of the magnitude of trust you need to commit to another entity for your online survival. Always do thorough research before choosing a TLD."

[1]: https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1613228573015568386 "TLD registries set their own prices. PS: .io is operated by Indian Ocean Territory. Then, "In 2017, a researcher managed to take control of four of the seven authoritative name servers for the .io domain.""

[2]: https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1688603657716248576 "Every company I consult with, I advise them to choose TLDs like you would email providers, web hosts, VPNs, and ISPs! They carry heavy risks."

[3]: https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/900740252498665472 "(Note the 1500% increase in price for the .hosting TLD.)"

[4]: https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1598092186024755200 "Many TLDs are unregulated and put your business at risk"

I would have said to just use dot-org once upon at time, but then this happened: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/how-we-saved-org-2020-...

In the meantime, at least thepiratebay.org is still up... and now that I think of it, it's a good canary for the integrity of dot-org.

It is blocked on a provider level by some jurisdictions, though. This is what I see in .nl:

https://imgur.com/a/4A0PsHh

Translated title is: > This page has been made inaccessible by court order.

So I think the integrity of .org is of little consequence if traffic to it gets blocked on provider level.

That's an issue with your country and one that you can easily work around by e.g. running your own recursive resolver or using one that does not care about your countries orders.

TLDs kicking out unsavory websites is global and does not have any automated workarounds.

I've been working with domain registrars since 2004, and while I haven't really kept current on the latest trends I do know that our national ccTLD has very good conflict arbitration.

So my suggestion is always to get a TLD where you feel safe that they can help resolve any potential conflicts that might arise.

At least for important networking stuff, your marketing can be on .ai or whatever is buzzing at the moment.

You're definitely right, though .ai refers to a British territory and therefore is on the more stable end politically. (though see .io for a counterexample; the TLD was sold off to a private company)

There are plenty of worse choices, like using .la (Laos) for Los Angeles, .dj (Djibouti) for DJ-related sites, or (particularly prevalent on HN) .rs (Serbia) for anything related to the Rust language.

we actually used an .ai domain and one night, round 11pm it stopped pointing to us. To add a record, the registrar at AI literally had a spreadsheet which upserts all the records when they upload it, and someone fat-fingered the row with our domain. It took the whole night to get a hold of the one person on that island who could fix it. This was about 5 years ago, maybe they've gotten better.

I think the most obvious, "This isn't going to work out," was queer.af losing their domain name, because the Taliban doesn't take kindly to queer folk.

Basing your entire business on a ccTLD is very risky. All it takes is a coup and boom you’re toast.

It may be a good choice if it is your local ccTLD, your country is fairly stable and your customers are fine with it.

For example .de is the perfect choice if you are a German company servicing primarily the German market.

Most businesses own their brand name under at least a few TLD's. It's fairly easy to shift customers over from yourbrand.com to yourbrand.org.

And you'd be smart to have your mobile app fall back to a backup domain if your main domain is uncontactable.

How often does that happen?

I wish TLDs were decentralized so that goofy stuff like this would never happen. It (having companies and entities own and control TLDs) never should have happened in the first place.

I don't think it's a bad thing that a country has control over it's TLD. Using `.ai` is overloading the proper use case for that TLD.

Countries should have their own TLDs, but they should be more obvious and/or not available to the public.

ccTLDs were obvious until ICANN opened the floodgates to new gTLDs.

What would you consider to be a “safe” TLD? I imagine most ccTLDs are off the table, and even a lot of the gTLDs are shady, so .com/.org/.net?

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