Zoom outage caused by accidental 'shutting down' of the zoom.us domain

What TLD is not subject to a country's laws? .aq? .su?

Edit: .eu might be an even better candidate for this requirement, but you can ask British former domain owners how that worked out

gTLDs just subject you to an additional layer of incompetence, namely from the company running it. The government where they're located can still come knocking. It's also not like e.g. .nl is run by the Dutch government officials, it's a nonprofit started by some people in the 80s iirc

It's the specific country being referenced, I think.

They wrote that they were talking about country code TLDs vs not, not about US vs. other countries. (Which is what I would've said too, it's a more general point than thinking about anything specific to one country.)

Ironically that one country happens to be the one that also controls gTLDs like .com, as others have pointed out, so arguably .us is the one ccTLD that isn't any more or less likely to be reliable.

Presumably the idea is that fabricating a legal offense to shut down a ccTLD would be easier than it would be for regular TLDs.

I don't know if that's actually the case, I've heard some shady sites are using .su(Soviet Union) to avoid judicial actions.

Wait, we're talking about buying domain names right? Not about buying countries in order to own a ccTLD rather than a 'regular' TLD

So then you don't have to produce an offence that takes the TLD down (whichever kind) but one that makes a judge within the country that the TLD operator operates in approve a takedown notice for your domain name or even get the TLD operator to cooperate voluntarily

gTLDs are regulated by ICANN. As much as an organization can achieve to be a global multistakeholder group, at least the intention is to be global.

ICANN have a mostly hand-off approach to ccTDLs. The intention is that each country decide on their own regulations and management when it comes to their country code specific domains.

.nl is a very special case, and it is true that the Dutch government was not involved. .nl was the first country code TLD created outside of the US, when the domain system still was part of ARPANET and operated by the United States Department of Defense. .nl was then transferred to a foundation 10 years later, and that's where ownership now resides.

ccTLDs are somewhat of a mess. Many are created in universities, then transferred to a company or foundation. Others were sold to companies from the start. In some cases, government have sold their ccTLD to other countries.

.se for example was created in a Swedish university, and then later the government took possession of it (or the university gave it to them, can't really say). Now there are laws that explicitly defines how it should be used and governed, which then a non-profit foundation manage the implementation.

> gTLDs just subject you to an additional layer of incompetence, namely from the company running it.

ccTLDs also have to be run by some organization, which is often a private company. Maybe the country's oversight over this organization is better than ICANN's oversight over gTLD operators. Maybe it's not. Historically, the worst technical incidents have occurred at ccTLDs.

IIRC one of the Balkan countries physically stole the DNS servers of another one's ccTLD.

After the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992 there was a dispute between Slovenia and FYR Serbia and Montenegro over the .yu domain that lasted until 1994 when Jon Postel intervened.

As you might notice from the dates and names, this was very early in the history of TLDs.