1. you need to have a person (juridicial or natural) with an address in Germany to register and list that person as ADMIN-C
2. if you run a website that provide contents which COULD generate revenue, you have to have an Impressum [1] which includes the address, names, etc. of the website owner.
This is pretty annoying if you are sensitive about privacy and do not want your details out in the open.
This is a major criticism I have with many other domains, I don’t know where to send a C&D, or whom to sue if they violate my rights.
And requiring only commercial entities to have these things also makes sense.
1. you want to do something like wiki leaks
2. you want to publish your thoughts anonymously, let's say you are from the LGTB spectrum and want to engage with people by building a forum or blog to communicate with them -> this could lead to potential problems with family, friends and work
3. you have political views and publish them. Now say someone disagrees with your views and is potentially aggressive. Do you want them to know where your family lives?
4. you do not wan't annoying calls by people who crawl the DENIC records (happens to me regularly)
I agree with you that a person should be liable for the stuff they do, but should also be able to engage in open discussion while protecting their privacy. FWIW If someone does bad stuff on a .de domain there are several options:
a) take down the domain via DENIC, or b) take down the domain via ISP or c) take down the domain via Hosting provider
If you really did illegal stuff, I am with you and someone (DENIC, ISP or Host) probably should have the knowledge of the domain owner which could be subpoenaed to lawfully prosecute someone.
https://www.google.com/search?q=china+lgbt+web&ie=utf-8&oe=u...
I actually just met a bunch of the denic guys at a conference they hosted a month ago in Frankfurt. They're on point with their Internet stuff.
More so for .me, ran by the owners of .org
Unlike the rarely used .us for the USA, it is used for the vast majority of canadian domestic corporations' web identities.
gTLDs & ccTLDs have to be some of the worst ideas in Internet history.
Not if you're an investor in Donuts, LLC, they're not...
The gTLDs have a pretty strict ICANN contract they have to follow; ccTLDs are looser.
It's like time traveling to 1987.
> We will email you a password after which you need to login and pay the $100, unless you are resident in Anguilla.
> After this we will send you a letter, fax and short text message (SMS) with codes on them. Please, be sure your information is correct so you can receive verifiaction codes. When you get these you need to login and enter them.
> We will also wait 3 months to make sure there is no problem with your credit card. But each successfully verification will decrease this period by one month, so if you pass all of them you do not need to wait 3 month.
Shame it's so arcane/expensive ($100 for account, then $100/2 years per domain) - there's a couple of joke domains I might have picked up if they were cheap enough (gomennas.ai / ebihara.ai [character from Persona4]).
I do appreciate that the TLD alone resolves though: http://ai./
God knows how widely a "ben@google" email address would work though. I'm going to guess not very.
That and apparently ICANN would frown upon such an implementation [1]
At least somebody grabbed the delightfully multilayered dope.af domain already...
The reason for me is totally clear: Github Pages gives me a free subdomain for http://pingtype.github.io but not .com.
I registered http://peterburk.github.com before that policy changed.
I really hope that one never becomes available..
I will, however, say that gTLDs are generally more secure and well-run than smaller ccTLDs, and are worth preferring for that reason. It's a weird historical quirk that .io randomly became popular in the developer community, but there are better options. And, as you point out, it's morally suspect, which is why we don't use it for new domain names.