If I purchase a personal domain, do I need to consider the reputation of the registrar that manages that TLD? I’m including country, generic and other subtypes of TLD here. For example I remember finding out about the bad reputation of the .men TLD (although I have never seen a site using it):
Spamhaus claims that some registrars “knowingly sell high volumes of domains to these actors for profit, and many registries do not do enough to stop or limit this endless supply of domains” – putting a spotlight on the darker side of the DNS.
Yes, but gTLDs (basically anything other than two-letter ones) are subject to higher reliability standards. You’ll have some with a worse reputation than others (like your .men example), probably depending on their pricing/popularity, but they should all generally be reliable.
Two-letter country code TLDs are held to no standards by ICANN, and could literally be entirely hosted on a single server in the basement of some island country’s government building if that country wanted. I wouldn’t purchase a domain on a ccTLD, even one masquerading as a generic TLD like .me, .io, or .co.
Just because people use them doesn’t make that statement not true.
If Proton wants their business domains to be at the whims of the governments of Montenegro, Colombia, and the British Indian Ocean Territory, that’s on them
There was also this a while ago, where someone bought the domains for the authoritative name servers for the whole .io zone. Somehow the order went through. Doesn’t instill me with a lot of confidence.
An extreme example, but a real-world one nonetheless: The Taliban took control of the .af TLD and shut down a Mastodon server today (some reports say all .af domains registered with Gandi).
Impressive that they didn’t kick the domain out actually. I would have expected different responses from the new TLD owner… Anyways same as you said already I have also been amazed with people using all kinds of ccTLD’ of counties that can cause some problems to say the least.
there is also the ethical question of .io domains. Chagosians don’t receive any of the money from the use of .io domains. the money funnels into the UK. Expulsion of the Chagossians - Wikipedia
On October 3, the British government announced that it was giving up sovereignty over a small tropical atoll in the Indian Ocean known as the Chagos Islands. The islands would be handed over to the neighboring island country of Mauritius, about 1,100 miles off the southeastern coast of Africa.
The story did not make the tech press, but perhaps it should have. The decision to transfer the islands to their new owner will result in the loss of one of the tech and gaming industry’s preferred top-level domains: .io.
Those generic TLDs you’re talking about can’t disappear, they are perfectly safe.
The .io thing is exactly why I said above that 2-character TLDs should be avoided, unless you’re in the actual country they represent and you trust your country’s political stability.
