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I don't understand what you mean by "country-ran." .us and .uk are ccTLDs, meaning they were created and recognized 2-3 decades ago by ICANN based on ISO country and Territory codes. ccTLSs are among the oldest continually operating TLDs. In fact, .io is a ccTLD.

But that doesn't make them "run by a country". .us is not run by the US government. It is run by Neustar. There is not something that says Neustar won't have poorly available/slow name servers, beyond that same statement that the .io people said.

I was under the impression that ccTLDs are administered/ran by the country they belong to (eg, I thought .us was administered by the US government). It sounds like I'm wrong though, my bad.

Countries have the oversight, but they usually contract out its administration to some company.

Well, happens with .se. in the past http://securityandthe.net/2009/10/13/se-domains-offline/ and other tlds as well.

.com would also be a very safe bet.