I'm in the TLD space (we run a fair number of gTLDs). If a gTLD operator screwed up like this then there could be consequences. A ccTLD, however, runs with very few restrictions. I don't see much of consequence happening to it as a result of this.
I will, however, say that gTLDs are generally more secure and well-run than smaller ccTLDs, and are worth preferring for that reason. It's a weird historical quirk that .io randomly became popular in the developer community, but there are better options. And, as you point out, it's morally suspect, which is why we don't use it for new domain names.
There are a few ccTLDs that differ from that, though. DENIC and CZNIC are two that are generally very well-run, DENIC even offering better security and safety than many gTLDs (while also being a cooperative, not a commercial NIC, so prices are very low, too)
It is really nice, that the .de domain is seen more as infrastructure than some business. But there are a few downsides to DENIC as well.
1. you need to have a person (juridicial or natural) with an address in Germany to register and list that person as ADMIN-C
2. if you run a website that provide contents which COULD generate revenue, you have to have an Impressum [1] which includes the address, names, etc. of the website owner.
This is pretty annoying if you are sensitive about privacy and do not want your details out in the open.
Agree to disagree. Of the top of my head I can think of several useful things where a public (private) address would be problematic:
1. you want to do something like wiki leaks
2. you want to publish your thoughts anonymously, let's say you are from the LGTB spectrum and want to engage with people by building a forum or blog to communicate with them -> this could lead to potential problems with family, friends and work
3. you have political views and publish them. Now say someone disagrees with your views and is potentially aggressive. Do you want them to know where your family lives?
4. you do not wan't annoying calls by people who crawl the DENIC records (happens to me regularly)
I agree with you that a person should be liable for the stuff they do, but should also be able to engage in open discussion while protecting their privacy. FWIW If someone does bad stuff on a .de domain there are several options:
a) take down the domain via DENIC, or b) take down the domain via ISP or c) take down the domain via Hosting provider
If you really did illegal stuff, I am with you and someone (DENIC, ISP or Host) probably should have the knowledge of the domain owner which could be subpoenaed to lawfully prosecute someone.
making a single person personally liable for content that's hosted on a domain is problematic, to say the least. Go down that path and you eventually end up where the chinese government is now. Where you need a "license" from some ministry to operate an http daemon and you need to hire censors to police all user generated content that disagrees with an authoritarian regime's politics.
I think it's more than a dozen. I would expect all wealthy, tech-savvy democracies to have fairly competently run ccTLDs. It's just that there's about 200 countries in the world, and quite a lot of those are a complete mess.
given the incredible importance to global internet infrastructure of things like the DE-CIX in frankfurt, I am not surprised that the Germans have their shit together when running critical back end systems.
if .ca was not competently run, I'm pretty sure the federal government would step in and put it into the hands of people with real DNS/network engineering credibility.
Unlike the rarely used .us for the USA, it is used for the vast majority of canadian domestic corporations' web identities.
ccTLDs are pretty much the most sensible thing in DNS hierarchy. The "original" TLDs (.com, .net, .org etc) had mostly lost their meaning by late 90s (iirc), and were heavily biased towards the US anyways and as such would have made far more sense as second-level domains for .us, where enforcing the separation could have at least hypothetically worked in some reasonable way.
ccTLDs don't appear to be held to very high standards. For example the .AF top level domain (which is controlled by the government's ministry of communications) doesn't even have a working website, www.nic.af
They're not held to any standards, really. Some of the smaller ccTLDs are basically just run using hand-edited zone files and spreadsheets to track ownership and expiration thereof.
There are also issues like the .LY ccTLD being owned by whatever government claims to be in control of Libya this month, and occasionally revoking domains for things they don't agree with. If I recall correctly for a long time there were several commercial services reselling .LY, but its stability is questionable at best.
We just used ai.google instead of google.ai as the canonical domain name for Google's AI initiative for precisely this reason. (We run .google and you can see the source code at https://nomulus.foo )
If I'm reading https://whois.ai/cgi-bin/register.py? correctly, I'm not sure it's strictly required - it might just delay our account by a month (it's not 100% clear IMO):
> We will email you a password after which you need to login and pay the $100, unless you are resident in Anguilla.
> After this we will send you a letter, fax and short text message (SMS) with codes on them. Please, be sure your information is correct so you can receive verifiaction codes. When you get these you need to login and enter them.
> We will also wait 3 months to make sure there is no problem with your credit card. But each successfully verification will decrease this period by one month, so if you pass all of them you do not need to wait 3 month.
Shame it's so arcane/expensive ($100 for account, then $100/2 years per domain) - there's a couple of joke domains I might have picked up if they were cheap enough (gomennas.ai / ebihara.ai [character from Persona4]).
I do appreciate that the TLD alone resolves though: http://ai./
FWIW, 101 Domains allows you to register a .ai domain (I registered zuse.ai there) and you don't have to do anything with a fax, etc. Now, maybe 101 has to fax something to somebody in Anguilla, but as the end user, you're isolated from that. Unless things have changed since I registered my domain.
Wouldn't that work like the old Compuserve or Prodigy email addresses? And if it would, wouldn't most email clients have to have "back-compatibility" with it?
because that's the URL that the admins of .AF publish. It could be http://whatever.af if they wanted that, but if it had an httpd not showing any content, would be equally as suspect.
what's wrong with the traditional .net ? software projects are pretty much all network related these days. or use the new gTLD .network which is pretty cheap to buy.
I will, however, say that gTLDs are generally more secure and well-run than smaller ccTLDs, and are worth preferring for that reason. It's a weird historical quirk that .io randomly became popular in the developer community, but there are better options. And, as you point out, it's morally suspect, which is why we don't use it for new domain names.