It is really nice, that the .de domain is seen more as infrastructure than some business. But there are a few downsides to DENIC as well.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressum

Well, this is what every domain should have, though. A Ladungsfähige Anschrift of a person that is liable.

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.

Agree to disagree. Of the top of my head I can think of several useful things where a public (private) address would be problematic:

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.

making a single person personally liable for content that's hosted on a domain is problematic, to say the least. Go down that path and you eventually end up where the chinese government is now. Where you need a "license" from some ministry to operate an http daemon and you need to hire censors to police all user generated content that disagrees with an authoritarian regime's politics.

https://www.google.com/search?q=china+lgbt+web&ie=utf-8&oe=u...

There's probably around a dozen ccTLDs that are really competently run and that are world-class. Beyond that I'd stick with competently run gTLDs.

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.

I think it's more than a dozen. I would expect all wealthy, tech-savvy democracies to have fairly competently run ccTLDs. It's just that there's about 200 countries in the world, and quite a lot of those are a complete mess.

given the incredible importance to global internet infrastructure of things like the DE-CIX in frankfurt, I am not surprised that the Germans have their shit together when running critical back end systems.

.me and .ca "seem" competently run.

More so for .me, ran by the owners of .org

if .ca was not competently run, I'm pretty sure the federal government would step in and put it into the hands of people with real DNS/network engineering credibility.

Unlike the rarely used .us for the USA, it is used for the vast majority of canadian domestic corporations' web identities.

And also the Canadian government for that matter