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
[List of all TLDs](https://uguu.libre.moe/files/vaREJnrk.txt)
Created with this script:
#!/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/$tld"
done
I’m afraid the non-US parts of the world need to decentralize the internet sooner rather than later
in the meantime autistici can register an .epic/.indy/.libre domain or help set up a new tld of their choosing in an alternative namespace
Why would they use a TLD that isn’t recognized by most DNS providers for e.g. their email services?
because of what’s going on right now. because they can’t get a domain from any organization that’s under the auspices of icann
edit: the alternative is for autistici to go nameless and for autistici users to type in an ip address instead of https://www.autistici.$TLD
to make the web resistant to such censorship we need to have service providers that accept and support alternative namespaces; the alternative to that is for service providers to just stop accepting the authority of the us government and organizations such as icann and stop accepting routes and dns records from entities that do[1] and create their own routing tables and dns records, thus effectively ending the inter part of the internet
accept the authority of the us government and organizations such as icann ↩︎
You could also use decentralized name services such as eth or sol domains.
you could, yes
which domain name servers resolve .eth and .sol domains? The ones I use don’t, unfortunately