Generally gTLDs are managed by private companies, not governments; the issue is that every company is under some government's jurisdiction. In this case, .info is managed by Afilias, which appears to be an Irish company and thus .info domains can probably be seized by the Irish government.
I missed the whole thing where .com was managed by the US, i thought that's why the .us domain was invented... i don't think anyone outside the US associates a .com meaning US based.
Regardless, stupid law, Team America strikes again!
The company which manages .com is headquartered in the US. This is also true for .org and .net and .us and .gov.
Under US law it is now possible for the US to seize any of these domain names -- and it will continue until the international organization in charge of this system (ICANN) says "oh, that's retarded, we're changing the system so that the US doesn't host .com and .org domains."
We had to fight against two acts proposed in the US which would have made it possible for the US to build a sort of DNS firewall to deny access to other domains from users working within the US -- our own rough draft of the Chinese firewall, if you like. (That was SOPA and PIPA.) But this other right was granted earlier than that, and is now being used to chilling effect.
Wow, thanks, I didn't know that. Why this stuff isn't decentralised is crazy, but at this point I guess there is a lot of vested interest to keep it that way.
EDIT: Just read about BitCoin! Sounding better and better now!
I imagine that corporate interests (records, movies) in the US and EU could collude to get a pirate site taken down if it had a .org, it would just be another tree to fall.
So far the US has not publicly tried to drop wikileaks.org, forcing WikiLeaks migrate to a TLD that is clearly outside US reach. Maybe they wouldn't want the bad press.
I'm wondering what is possible if I simply have a relationship with a reseller in the US (e.g. the one with the superbowl ads, or eNom), but my TLD registrar is outside of reach. I assume they could make the reseller drop the contract, or terminate it.
Maybe we can take some .is domains too. IMMI is going to be great.
Edit: I forgot to add that probably the safest TLD is from countries on their own and not being affected by Team America. Spain is not an option, we got our own SOPA by official pressures...
I'd say .is is probably the safest (just a shame they're not cheap but on the other hand there are still lots of good names available as a consequence).
They are not very expensive ($35 seems about right for a domain name) I considered a domain there, but was not sure if I needed to be a resident of Iceland.
I like how Iceland has been spunky enough and stood up to a lot of international pressure at times (fish wars with UK, granting citizenship to Bobby Fischer who US really did not like, but otherwise was quite harmless, the way Iceland has handled banking crisis).
What I am wondering is what gives Iceland this power to say NO to big powers?
It would seem like majors could just ostracize it just like most countries that ran afoul of bigger countries. Is it because going against Iceland would anger Scandinavian countries?
There are other reasons as well such as the way Iceland decided to ignore the IMF and default rather than go the Irish or Portuguese route when their economy blew up during the credit crunch.
Check out www.1984.is - I have a couple of .is domains registered through them and would consider their VPS service if I had something controversial to host.
Edit: forget to mention you don't need to be an Icelandic resident - registration is open to all.
