What Is the Most Free TLD?

TLDs only controlled by local courts:<p><pre><code> Austria (.at) Germany (.de) Iceland (.is) Russia (.ru) </code></pre> Of these, the blog simply makes the claim that Iceland has the &quot;strongest laws for individuals&quot;. Of those, I probably would have guessed that - germany doesn&#x27;t have a great rep, and Russia...well.<p>So I don&#x27;t necessarily disagree; but there is absolutely no justification actually given for elevating Iceland, and including that would seem to be half the value of the blog post.

Well that was abrupt. I was just getting into it, hit pagedown, and promptly hit the bottom of the page where the EU was dismissed and Iceland promptly declared victorious (together with .onion to which no laws apply in the first place).<p>What&#x27;s wrong with Switzerland? Norway? I know very little about Chad or Japan or Micronesia, perhaps they have great TLD rules as well? Heck, what even was the issue with the EU in the first place? I can think of GDPR as being seen as problematic in some constrained context, but privacy rules don&#x27;t apply to TLD ownership so this reader is just left wondering.

As a Dutch person I have to point out that the name of my birth country is not &quot;Holland&quot; but &quot;the Netherlands&quot; (pars pro toto), and that the flag that is shown in the graphic is the flag of Luxembourg - but upside down. Thanks?

I used to think it was .onion. I owned my .onion domains in the sense than only I had the private key that corresponded to the hash that was my brute forced vanity domain. I thought that meant I had control over them. I was wrong.<p>It turns out that even in p2p networks if there&#x27;s one one dominant development group then that group owns your domains. The Tor Project decided that tor v2, with all it&#x27;s potential exploits, could not exist alongside tor v3 and so all the tor v2 domains will disappear to the official tor clients this october 26th.<p>I don&#x27;t own my .onions so I won&#x27;t be making v3 sites.

Not sure how Iceland (.is) is outside EU laws, it&#x27;s in the EEA, which I&#x27;m pretty sure means it&#x27;s subject to (almost) all the EUs laws with little-to-no voting power or influence.

I’m not sure what you would be using your website for to be worried about being taken down. But Iceland removed the khilafah.is islamic state site website several years ago.

Looks like there are no restrictions on nationality or language (like .cat).<p>I was unable to set up my domain with Cloudflare&#x27;s name servers because you need to register the domain first and the registration process requires that the domain is served by the name servers you enter. I ended up selecting &quot;parked&quot; instead and should be able to switch it later.

Where I&#x27;m not clear this analysis is thorough is the consideration that ICANN is a U.S. non-profit corporation incorporated in California.<p>If we are to go with the laws of the land, the 14th amendment states:<p>&gt; No state shall...deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.<p>This means that ICANN, itself, is subject to all the laws of the jurisdiction of its location (municipal, county, state, and Federal).<p>If I understand ICANN&#x27;s role correctly, they control the entire WWW (DNS, IP address assignment, infrastructure, etc.), so everyone on the WWW is subject to the ICANN jurisdictional limitations.<p>Am I missing something?

Or take the red pill and go ENS (it now supports .com and btc addresses to name a few, not just .eth)

Why are all the TLD operated by the OpenNIC [1] project dismissed if .onion is included in the study?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opennic.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opennic.org&#x2F;</a>

This post makes me happy to own a .is domain , not that I was worried, but it&#x27;s cool to accidentally have the bonus of what this post describes.

&gt; .com, .net, and .org are all owned by Verisign<p>This does not seem accurate to me. The Wikipedia [1] page for .org says it is managed&#x2F;controlled by the Public Interest Registry and not Verisign.<p>I recall this because of the scummy deal the PIR was trying to do to sell .org to a PE firm.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;.org</a>

gandi.net seems to charge $364&#x2F;year for any .is domain. Namecheap charges around the same price as isnic.<p>Any reason why I shouldn&#x27;t register the domain on isnic directly? Are there benefits to registering the domain via namecheap (or other registrar), apart from getting access to their support?

What about other TLDs like .fun (libgen’s latest)? There are so many others now.

So, next step would be an iceland hoster. Any suggestions for icland only hosters &#x2F; data centers?

freest

Interesting that they don’t define free. I prefer my freedom of privacy over your freedom of expression, so which wins in a pithy contest?

I hope one day, we will have some crypto blockchain gTLD that will resolve in the general DNS infrastructure. I know namecoin was a thing, but it never really picked up steam.<p>name -&gt; IP address in a blockchain feels like one of the ideal use cases of it.<p>Maybe a premine started by a commercial entity would have enough financial backing to get started on it.