Kim Dotcom loses new domain in preemptive strike by Gabon government

Also, ships don't use flags of convenience for their colors but for laws that are advantageous to them.

The parent posting didn't question that. On the contrary, the fact that ships chose their flag by law instead of color - that was exactly the parent posting's point.

I might not be in a demographic that matters, but I do wonder about the numbers.

If you're operating from NZ, you're already exposed to NZ law. A .co.nz domain name adds no additional risk. You may need to pick your country based on favorable laws -- i.e. don't run a gambling site from the US, and don't be a US citizen. HK is actually one of the better choices. The US is actually good for a lot of things, too.

If you're in the US, .com/.net/.org are all roughly equivalent, although I still think .com is the best overall tradeoff. There are some differences in individual registry ToS, but every one I've read is flexible enough as to be meaningless if they want to do something.

It's probably fair to say the US is the biggest risk for anyone operating in a non-US country except for their own government, so .com is a "safe" backup choice as well.

If you're really worried, the only safe choice is .onion :) Safe from having large numbers of users, too! (you'd be better off at that point distributing some kind of client software, or running multiple pop-up frontends accessing a common API, and then making it easy to move the API around using client-side failover.)

Though, as someone pointed out, if you follow the purse strings you hit Vivendi which is deeply invested in copyright. Seems likely that someone realized that they had access to kill his .ga domain, sent out the relevant requests, and extreme (rather than measured) action was taken.