"The DHS / Department of Justice have proven that US domains are not particularly safe or immune from arbitrary shutdown either."

That's true, but you're using false dichotomy - safe or not.

This is an issue of percentages. Technically, the United States might turn into a dictatorship overnight and choose to disconnect from the Internet, or be conquered, or a lot of other things might happen (most of which are less radical; the DOD orders a takedown of your domain, for example).

But it's pretty clear (to me at least) that buying a .com means you're much more likely to not have any issues, than buying a .ly. And if a registrar has just gone down, taking thousands of domain names with it, I'll be right - .com's will be statistically more stable.

I don't think the .LY registrars or the high-profile .LY domain owners (such as bit.ly) would have agreed with your assertion that the .LY domain name put them at a substantially higher risk than registering a .COM. If so, what rational business person would risk their business, brand, and traffic on the .LY domain? If you assert that a .LY domain doesn't / didn't have an intrinsically higher risk than a .COM, then my original statement isn't the false dichotomy that you think it is.

Of course, here in April 2011 now we know that the risk was there all along. And now, any sane / rational business owner should think twice / again about registering a .LY domain.

But given that 12 months ago, the above statement that a .LY represented a substantially higher risk than a .COM would have been laughed at. Who would have thought that there would be civil war in Libya in 2009 or 2010? If you did, then maybe a job in political science awaits you.

People were saying it was risky 12 months ago, and 24 months ago. Bit.ly chose their domain because it's short, and they probably couldn't afford as short of a name for a .com. In retrospect they should have taken bit.us or something similar.

Now their plan seems to be to distribute amongst many domains (having used j.mp a lot recently) so there's no single point of failure and that seems to be working as well.

Bit.ly's a unique case though, and doesn't represent the fad of taking .ly domains because it turns your company name into an adverb.

Percentage-wise, I'd probably pick a stable country that didn't even respect the UDRP, never mind the RIAA.

But at the same time, I don't mind giving money to "America" as a whole.

It's not about who you give the money to, though that may also be a valid concern, but how you build a reliable business if your site can be taken down for arbitrary reasons at any time.

Exactly - ask those whose domains were shutdown / confiscated / knocked off the net if they could have ever foreseen that the DHS / DOJ would have or could have taken them down... without even the benefit of due process.