.online is one of the many TLDs that charge a dollar for registration but bump the price to $30-$35 for renewal. So far, this seems like a good signal to tell apart serious TLDs and ones just preying on customers who sort by cheapest (or capitalizing on one-off phishing domains).

I had a .fun domain that I was using to host a small project and they pulled that on me, I just let it expire and killed the project.

This is the real story. This is 100% a problem with Radix. Safe browsing targets the website not the domain. No reason a registrar should be suspending an entire account over something a company reports. Black-holing the A and CNAMEs on a subdomain? Maybe..... But even then I don't think it's the registrars place to do that. Freezing the entire account? Absolutely not.

Blackholing the a and cnames would prevent getting off the safe browsing list, as mentioned in the blog post.

Google allows you to use TXT to verify though, since this "feature" of disabling domains because of Safe Search is based only on web contents (A/AAAA/CNAME) they could disable those and allow TXT anyway since those are AFAIK harmless

The followup from that would appear to be don't use any domain that Radix controls.

Yeah this doesnt seem like a unique or new issue:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40195410

More generally, I think it's advisable to prefer the ccTLDs of places that are politically stable. And (IMO) to view com/net/org as defacto US ccTLDs (technically they aren't but for all practical purposes they might as well be).

Registry, not registrar

Thanks, yes, even worse! The registry should act on only legal orders IMHO.

Who said serious use is their business model though.

It's the registry, not the registrar. I made a website that tries to help explain some of the lesser known nuances and risks relating to domains. The section about domain reclassification is based on first hand experience and is especially interesting IMO:

https://tldrisk.com/beyond-basics/reclassification/

> This basically makes the entire TLD unviable for serious use.

It doesn't just make the TLD in question unusable. I think it makes most of the new gTLDs unusable. Registries can enact policies and systems like this, regardless of the detriment to registrants, due to a lack of oversight and registrant consideration by ICANN. That creates uncertainty and makes it pragmatic for registrants to simply choose the gTLDs with lots of history and precedence; .com, .org, etc..

The only two TLDs I'd personally rely on are .com (gTLD) and .ca (ccTLD).