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Comment by legrande | Hacker News Reader

As a rule of thumb, I never register a ccTLD. You don't know the Geo-politics and baggage that TLD is under. Some countries are incredibly unstable, and that could be reflected in the ccTLD. The only exception is if you are a resident of that country and have a valid passport to reflect you live in that country, and that the domain can be claimed & validated because you live there.

Sometimes ccTLDs bind you to a country you don't live in, and it also signals that you may like/honor that country's practices and history (which you probably don't).

What I do is, choose generic TLDs like .blog and .dev. In the past .tk was considered low-rep because it was free, and it raised red flags, so at least pay for a domain. They're the same price as a T-Shirt!

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That can hardly apply to .FR — no-one uses that for domain hacks, it's from a very stable country, and has very wide use within that country.

I'd rather suggest that using the very cheapest service providers means you're risking problems when you need customer support — in this case because notifications were missed due to a broken phone or whatever.

This comments feels very out of touch with reality. Nobody is going to associate your usage of an .ai domain with you honoring or liking Anguilla practices and history. It's a domain, you buy it because it sounds good for your marketing purposes. Unless you get some very obscure ones that might be associated with spammers and blacklisted (like .tk), you are going to be fine and nobody is going to associate you with that country.

Besides, it's highly unlikely you are ever going to have a problem with geopolitics and instability. For most countries it's just free money flowing in, especially with the trending ones (.ai, .io, .tv, .fm).

Note .IO is the British Indian Oceans Territory, which is a disputed territory claimed by Mauritius.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagos_Archipelago_sovereignty...

> The only exception is if you are a resident of that country and have a valid passport to reflect you live in that country, and that the domain can be claimed & validated because you live there.

Isn't that the whole purpose of ccTLDs? In fact, are you sure that your use case for ccTLDs for countries you have no connection with is actually allowed or legitimate?

Every single time I registered a ccTLD the registrar required me to provide documentation that attested I had in fact a relationship with said country, either a valid passport or business details. Frankly, I thought any other scenario was automatically deemed invalid.

I can confirm you need some kind of legal address (person or company) in France to register a .fr domain.

Any address in the EU (or Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Lichtenstein) works as well.

No, you don't. I am French and have an .fr domain and was never asked for proof of anything.

You are told that you have to something something France but it is just an information.

> No, you don't. I am French and have an .fr domain and was never asked for proof of anything.

Namecheap disagrees. From Namecheap's support page:

> Any company or individual residing within the European Union as well as in Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein can register a .FR domain.

https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx...

Not sure what you mean. I wrote that there was never any proof required. Even the page you linked states that what is needed is only

> Date of birth (in the YYYY/MM/DD format)

> Country of birth

> NOTE: If “France” is selected in the Country of birth field, the registrants should also provide the city of birth and zip/postal code:

I was born on 1970-01-01 in 75001 Paris, France. There you are, an .fr registered.

Some countries require you to either be a citizen or have a business there, yes. But it’s definitely not the case for all ccTLDs.

some ccTLDs in the EU require you to be a citizen in any EU country. (So .fr or .eu for example)

Examples of the latter are for example .to or .ag, that do not have such requirement.

There are actually benefits to registering for a ccTLD in your country of nationality, as you're touching on, but others reading are missing or not aware. .ca also has these features.

> some ccTLDs in the EU require you to be a citizen in any EU country. (So .fr or .eu for example)

I don't know about .fr but the .eu ccTLD is literally the European Union's TLD. The same exact requirements are applied: you need to either be a citizen or have a business there. If you attempt to register a domain with the .eu TLD you must provide an European ID card.

It's the same thing.

Yes, that is what I meant. That you need to be a citizen of the EU.

Sorry if I wrote it in a way that was easily misunderstood.

The point was that its not the case for all ccTLDs.

> The point was that its not the case for all ccTLDs.

I don't understand. For .eu it is indeed the very same thing, isn't it? You still need to be either a citizen or have business there to apply for a domain.

For .eu yes.

But I also mentioned .to and .ag for example where this is not the case.

Both are ccTLDs that have no such requirements. There are others as well.

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