Something bad about misusing country codes, but I guess that’s an argument long lost.

What's wrong with using the ISO codes here?

The ccTLDs belong to the sovereign entity whose code it is, in many cases they let some for-profit outfit exploit this resource and keep some fraction of the resulting income.

If the sovereign entity doesn't like how it's run, that's on them to fix it. It's unfortunate if people somehow end up building something important using a name that's ultimately controlled by some tin pot dictatorship, but it's not like you don't know up front.

I thought that, by convention, all dictators were "tin pot". And that the republics they governed were always "banana".

Banana republics are ones that US corporate interests installed after forcing out more democratic leadership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic#Guatemala

> Why? Is there something inherently bad about free domains?

Not the person you've asked but I've seen many legitimate websites using free eu.org[1] (sub)domains but I believe I've never seen a legit use of tk/ml/ga/gq TLDs. I may have seen the cf one used for some configuration tools though.

[1] https://nic.eu.org/

Tokelau, Mali, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and the Central African Republic are all actual countries with legitimate users, although admittedly they're also quite small and poor.

I can’t argue about the rest of them but Tokelau is a series of atolls in the pacific with a population of 1400. Additionally, even the official government website is hosted in New Zealand’s TLD.

https://www.tokelau.org.nz/

So yes, they are actual counties but we can’t use that information to pressure that there’s must be at least one legitimate user (e.g. the government).

There are plenty of local sites, search tokelau site:tk for examples. ISPs, mobile networks, visitor attractions etc.

Poor, yes, but mostly not that small. Mali is huge, 5 times bigger than the UK, and has a population of 21.5 million. Central African Republic is half that size, with 5 million people. Gabon is smaller, but still bigger than the UK, and has 2.3 million people. Equatorial Guinea is actually small, but still has 1.7 million people. Tokelau is tiny in both size and population, and isn't even an independent country.

> Gabon is smaller, but still bigger than the UK, and has 2.3 million people.

I doubt GP meant 'quite small' land area. In terms of population then, the UK is roughly 35 times the size of Gabon.

While the landmasses are bigger than the UK for some of these countries, their population totals all summed still don't eclipse half the UK's population. They are quite small.

Well, a few of my friends have used these domains because they were free, but it seems like they kind of use bait-and-switch tactics, monitoring DNS traffic and asking "owners" to pay a hefty fee for the domain name once popularity crosses a certain threshold.

Webmasters also have little control on records and other parameters that are standard at other registrars.

tcl.tk is my favorite usage, here.

I'm using a free .tk

https://cannes-ratings.tk/

I've never used Freenom because I've repeatedly seen warnings (for years) that if your 'free' domain starts getting noticeable traffic they will suddenly decide you need to pay them for it and shut down DNS resolution until you do.

Yeah, that's pretty common. If you get a large amount of traffic, they take the domain from you and try to sell it back to you as as "premium" domain at a hugely inflated price.

You don't have any rights to free domains. Freenom are the 'official' owner of the domain and can do whatever they want with it.

I believe the issue is with Freenom. They offer very bad service and you shouldn't use their services for important projects because sometimes you may lose your domain even if you paid for it.