My local ccTLD answers to the democratic government on which I vote. ICANN is a foreign entity and answers to the US government.
On the other hand, there are oddities like .eu that have too many layers of abstraction between the people and the actual administrators; zombie ccTLDs like .su and .yu which stand for countries that no longer exist; and phantom ccTLDs like .io which don't stand for any officially recognized country at all. So it really depends on which ccTLD you're talking about.
Indeed. ccTLD vanity domains are a bad idea in general, and using .af for such purposes is an extraordinarily bad idea. As another comment pointed out, the article's conclusion of "avoid all ccTLDs" rather than "do your due diligence" is weird.
Having said that, if OP is from the United States, I can sort of understand why the conclusion goes "avoid all ccTLDs." Americans have a tendency to treat the initial set of gTLDs as their own -- not only .gov, .mil, and .edu, but all the well-known ones, too.
Regardless of how good or bad a government it is, you are already subject to its jurisdiction.
Someone living and doing business in Canada might be eligible for .ca right now, but what if they decide to immigrate to the United States, and do business in the Bay Area instead? That's a fairly common situation for startup founders, but things can get really hairy unless they are a full Canadian citizen.
A similar case is for American Samoa (.as), Guam (.gu). Etc.
Although it is technically correct to say they are not "internationally recognized countries", that's because they are not countries, not because they are not internationally recognized (they very much are). Thus the qualifier is confusing.
It is like if I claimed that my cat is not an "dog from this planet". That statement is true not because my cat comes from another planet, but simply because it's not a dog in the first place.
The Chagossians do exist, and I'm not trying to diminish their claims. But my understanding is that they claim the islands as a part of Mauritius, which also has its own domain name (.mu), and wouldn't identify with the colonial BIOT government that expelled them in any case.
https://www.biot.gov.io/ is a genuine use.
https://www.sure.io/ is another (an ISP).
There are also a number of other territories that are not countries that have ccTLDs: .re, .gs, .mq, .fk etc.
If you are in Afghanistan and run your business in Afghanistan in a legitimate way, intending to comply with Afghanistan laws, then there's no issue at all in using an .af TLD.
And conversely, you should treat e.g. .uk and .fr as "exotic" if you're not in there and don't intend to spend the time and effort to learn about what is permitted there and not, it would make all sense for you to get kicked off of these domains by doing something that's obviously legal where you live.
I've never understood the model of having a single democratic process be the arbiter of every issue. It just allows gamesmanship where factions can play up issue X to win votes, then use the political power they obtain to push their agenda on completely unrelated issue Y. I suspect this is a major motivation for a lot of the exaggerated political polarization around symbolic "culture war" issues.
I trust the ccTLD of my country more than the gTLDs that are private entities.
I don't even consider it logically possible for a singular government advancing a singular policy to represent "the people", because that concept represents an aggregation of many distinct individuals and communities, and all controversies and conflicts of interests that are addressed via politics emerge from within that aggregation.
Politics is a tool for mitigating disputes arising from divergences of values or conflicts of interests within "the people", so the idea of treating it as something that expresses a singular set of values or interests applicable to the whole is incorrect.
> I trust the ccTLD of my country more than the gTLDs that are private entities.
The point is that everything is a private entity, even the government-run ones. All institutions are groups of specific people inhabiting a bounded context, and there's no mechanism for effectively making any particular institution accountable to a speculative aggregation of millions, so the distinction of between "public" and "private" is largely meaningless.
> so the distinction of between "public" and "private" is largely meaningless
In my country, what's "public" is owned by the government, and the government is elected by the people. There is an obvious difference between what is public and what is private, to the point where it is actually hard for me to imagine that someone living in my country may believe that the distinction is meaningless.
> I don't even consider it logically possible for a singular government advancing a singular policy to represent "the people"
Imagine that the people elects the government. Not one president, but the whole government. You will end up with elected officials ranging from the left to the right. If more people vote for the right, then there are more officials on the right, but there are still others that are elected on the left/center. For important matters, you have a referendum, where the people can directly vote on the topic at hand.
The result of that is that if you always disagree with everything the government does, it means that you are part of a pretty small minority in your country. So you, individually, are not represented by the government, but most of the citizen are.
That's the whole point. If you believe that everyone should have a government with which they agree 100% of the time, then that's not possible. But if you believe that, you need to learn how to compromise, for your own sake.
All formalities. The government is just a specific institution within society, and all of the symbolic rituals by which it appears to be acting on behalf of "the people" are illusions.
> There is an obvious difference between what is public and what is private, to the point where it is actually hard for me to imagine that someone living in my country may believe that the distinction is meaningless.
There is no obvious difference. It takes a heavy stack of conditioned assumptions to make the distinction in the first place, where a hypothetical space alien observing our planet would just see groups of humans acting in bounded contexts.
> Imagine that the people elects the government. Not one president, but the whole government. You will end up with elected officials ranging from the left to the right. If more people vote for the right, then there are more officials on the right, but there are still others that are elected on the left/center. For important matters, you have a referendum, where the people can directly vote on the topic at hand.
"Left" and "right" are just about as arbitrary as distinctions as "public" and "private" are.
There's no way to make any specific office-holder, let alone all of them, accountable to a vast aggregation of disparate individuals, each in equal measure, when the divergences in values and conflicts of interest among that set of individuals is where all of the controversies that those offices exist to mitigate come from in the first place.
> The result of that is that if you always disagree with everything the government does, it means that you are part of a pretty small minority in your country.
I don't always disagree with everything that the government does at the object level. It's just that I recognize that the cost of the government doing the things that I do like is (a) doing lots of stuff I don't like in parallel, (b) doing things that are harmful to others for my benefit, both of which I dislike.
That's why I prefer to have a plurality of solutions maintained by the wide range of communities and institutions that aren't the government, catering to all values and interests in parallel, without usually having to make the compromises inherent in centralization.
> That's the whole point. If you believe that everyone should have a government with which they agree 100% of the time, then that's not possible.
I think that most people should be going about their affairs in most matters without any direction from the government in the first place, so there should be little for them to agree or disagree with at all. For the few issues that do involve the whole of society, cannot be meaningfully disaggregated, and for which only a single approach is possible, then your comments regarding compromise are applicable.
Well, if you take it like that, then of course we are all animals, we don't need laws, and we will all die eventually so what's the point? But that's an easy and uninteresting take.
I get it, you're a libertarian, you don't want a government to "dictate" what you should or should not do. Now my answer to that would be that some people have different opinions and believe that having a government that defines what the people can and cannot do is the fair way. There are things that I definitely don't want you to be able to do even if it I don't even know that you are doing them.
And there are countries that have a functioning democratic process that most of the people is happy about. And in those countries, relying on the ccTLD makes sense.
It's not a question of needing laws -- it's that laws are either emergent from the incentives inherent in a given social context, or they aren't really laws at all.
The idea of law as a product of legislation, i.e. some specific organization formulating prescriptive rules in the abstract and then using the threat of force to coerce people into compliance, is almost a contradiction in terms, inasmuch as the strongest faction using force to make others comply with their demands is what you already have in a raw state of nature without having to formalize any concept of law to begin with.
> I get it, you're a libertarian, you don't want a government to "dictate" what you should or should not do.
No, it's a bit beyond that. It's that I don't really recognize the concept of "government" in the way you're using it as anything that really exists. Everything is just specific people acting on the motivations they already have within bounded contexts.
What you call "government" is really just a specific group of people, like any other, differentiated only by their use of symbolic woo-woo to override their own reservations about violating moral norms that everyone else generally adheres to.
> Now my answer to that would be that some people have different opinions and believe that having a government that defines what the people can and cannot do is the fair way
The problem is that government can't define what other people can and cannot do. They have no control over what inherent abilities or capacities others have. All they can do is threaten people with reprisals for ignoring their dictates, and many people routinely call their bluff and do what they want anyway.
And since the thing that restrains people from transgressing against each other is primarily the incentives inherent to human social relations, not the threat of reprisal from third parties who aren't present, it stands to reason that much of what "government" actively intervenes to enforce are rules that it is imposing onto society, but which society itself does not consent to.
> And there are countries that have a functioning democratic process that most of the people is happy about. And in those countries, relying on the ccTLD makes sense.
And, again, most of that "democratic process" is defined by people who have no idea what ccTLDs are and have no opinions on the matter, where the NIC is a de facto "private" organization in the first place.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Assigned_Numbers_Au...
Meanwhile ICANN is an international company so it doesn't answer to any government except within their respective borders.