Why: so your site can’t be taken down by the USA.

At least one .org website that I know of has been shut down because the USA pressured the US organisation that controls the .org domain into doing so.

They could repeat this at will for quite a number of sites.

An immediate step to prevent this possibility, if you run a website, is to register a domain that is controled outside the US.

I have not found one article that just lists them all, but each of the TLDs has its own wikipedia article, e.g. .org (US controled), .eu (not US controled, yay) etc.

Ultimately ICANN controls all of this, and that’s a US orga too, and Trump could bully them into doing shit, too. But the people who know about these things don’t seem to think that’s a likely threat right now. Also ICANN seems to defer a lot of tasks to exactly these TLD orgas. After all the internet still is (somewhat) decentralized.

Context

https://www.inventati.org/campaign/press

Further reading

https://blog.apnic.net/2023/01/13/who-controls-the-internet/
https://netmeister.org/blog/tlds.html

#!/bin/sh  

max=26  
curl https://www.internic.net/domain/root.zone | \  
awk '{if ($4 == "NS") { print $1;}}'| sort -u | \  
while read tld; do  
    [ "${#tld}" -lt 2 ] && continue  
    tld=".${tld%.}"  
    pre="$tld"  
    while [ "${#pre}" -lt "$max" ]; do pre="$pre "; done  
    echo "$pre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$tld"  
done