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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

It’s not just Verisign on .com; the entire gTLD system is corrupt (ccTLDs vary). .org and .info are probably even clearer examples.

I have wondered at times whether gTLDs were a mistake and everything should have been under ccTLDs.

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ccTLDs have their own problems, many of them have been effectively privatized and are operated just like gTLDs.

One particular weird example would be the Bulgarian .bg TLD: https://eualternative.eu/guides/bulgaria-bg-private-registry...

This is actually a part of the reason why I wonder whether gTLDs were a mistake. You end up with monsters like the (offensively-named) private equity firm “Ethos Capital” who have indulged in typical private-equity behaviour and what I will call credibly-alleged corruption, in order to take over more and more of the domain name registration system, and exploit it where they can (e.g. .info rates are I think more than triple what they were when I registered in 2008, where .com has gone up by only something like 10%).

The story of .org price caps and the Ethos Capital sale, where sanity prevailed in about nine tenths of one of the two cases (Ethos Capital didn’t get to buy .org, but they do operate it), shows some of these issues.

I just wonder if, in the absence of gTLDs which it can own, with only ccTLDs to operate, Afilias might not have become the monster it did.

I am naive for hoping things might have turned out better, but… maybe.

Tbh the .bg situation seems rather internal problem in Bulgaria rather than problem in the system. As the article mentions, governments definitely can get control of their tld if they want to, so the problem here seems to be that Bulgaria isn't interested.

gTLDs at least have some minimal level of accountability and security standards.

ccTLDs are at the whim of the country. If you went with the '.su' ccTLD from the soviet union some years back, well, that would have been quite unfortunate.

Legally I feel like they're also worse. Like, say you're an abortion clinic operating in the regressive country of the US, and you get a '.us' ccTLD, surely it's more likely the government outlaws abortions and censors your domain via the registrar than if you used a '.com'?

I believe you made the wrong example using US, since gTLD like ".com" are de facto controlled also by US companies.

If we instead take another country, like Italy, the reasoning would be sound. If Italian governament bans abortions in Italy, it's more likely that the auhtorities are able to restrict the sites registered on .it than .com

Yes. I believe the Italian government would need to seek cooperation through diplomatic channels to shut down .com domains.

.com and most of the other traditional gTLDs should probably be considered equivalent to .us for legal issues.

They don't need to seek cooperation, they can order domestic blocks and come after the registrar's operations in Italy.

> If you went with the '.su' ccTLD from the soviet union some years back, well, that would have been quite unfortunate.

.su is still being operated. Still being sold, even. How bad .su is for you depends on how friendly you are with the current Russian regime (though that also applies to the American regime, as the owners of autistici.org found out, though .org has always been American and .su was non-Russian for about 15 months).

Very bad example: If your business is outlawed, that why is it a problem if the domain of the then illegal business is also censored? It is basically an expected outcome.

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