Some extensions require presence in the EU, eg .eu & .it [0]

IOW not available to citizens or companies in Europe, but not member of the EU eg. Bosnia and Herzegovina

[0] Who can register a .it domain? https://www.nic.it/en/find-your-it/faq

The registration of a domain name in the ccTLD .it is permitted only to persons who have citizenship, residence or a registered office in the countries of the European Economic Area (EEA), the Vatican, the Republic of San Marino, and Switzerland.

Although .gl isn't much of a risk, as Google has some presence in Denmark and relations to the country.

But you shouldn't use TLDs of countries with which you have no affiliation.

Aka why I mainly stick with .com

The issue it that a lot of .com are taken so for the sake of a personal email address it is not ideal.

The person that owns "belval.com" literally registered it before I was born so I settled for "belval.org", "belval.me", "belv.al" but only the first one is accepted by most company.

All 4-letter .com's were taken as of 2013.

https://whoapi.com/blog/we-are-out-of-4-letter-com-domains/

I wonder how long until all 5- and 6- letter are gone.

Exactly, I too had to use .net & .us, because.com was registered in 1995.

My last name ends in al but the domain is taken. The .com one is taken by a guy who’s using it to showcase his Holocaust family tree (oddly enough his son had a run in with my sis a while back). I tried reaching out to him to see if he was interested in taking like .org but he’s not :( so I got .me

I offered $1k (there's nothing on belval.com) and belval.org to the owner of belval.com, he just replied to say "never contact me again" as if I was with the mob or something. It was a weird experience.

So weird. Why would you hold something without any plan to sell it, nor a thought towards using it?