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They also would have needed to have used different TLDs to be outside the reach of US law enforcement. .com is run by Verisign, a US company, and if the FBI gi

They also would have needed to have used different TLDs to be outside the reach of US law enforcement. .com is run by Verisign, a US company, and if the FBI gives Verisign a court order to confiscate a given .com domain then Verisign can't say no. .com, .net, .org, .edu, and .gov are very much US-based and US-centric TLDs, which lots of people tend to forget. Whereas other countries use their own ccTLDs, we have .us but barely use it, for historical reasons.

sofixa 6y ago
> .com, .net, .org, .edu, and .gov are very much US-based and US-centric TLDs, .com, .net and .org weren't created as US-centric and it's a tragedy they are ( and it's an even bigger tragedy that .edu is US only). .org is widely used around the world though.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  They were created in 1985 before most of the world was even connected to the Internet. Near as I can tell it was just the US and the UK connected by a single undersea cable at that point in 1985? (Would love to know more history here though.) .com/.net were originally administered by the US Department of Defense, then in 1993 it went to the US National Science Foundation. They've always been US-centric, and most other countries have always generally tended to use their ccTLDs. .org too has always been run out of the US. If you don't want to be under the US's power, the correct course of action is and always has been to not use the gTLDs like .com, .net, .org that are operated in the US (and that for the first decade plus of existence were operated by the US). These TLDs were simply never country-agnostic; they have always had a much greater association with the US than with any other country. At some point, whatever the intent might have been 30+ years ago doesn't really matter practically speaking today. They are what they are and everyone knows, or should know, what they're getting with them.

sofixa 6y ago

> .com, .net, .org, .edu, and .gov are very much US-based and US-centric TLDs, .com, .net and .org weren't created as US-centric and it's a tragedy they are ( and it's an even bigger tragedy that .edu is US only). .org is widely used around the world though.

CydeWeys 6y ago
They were created in 1985 before most of the world was even connected to the Internet. Near as I can tell it was just the US and the UK connected by a single undersea cable at that point in 1985? (Would love to know more history here though.) .com/.net were originally administered by the US Department of Defense, then in 1993 it went to the US National Science Foundation. They've always been US-centric, and most other countries have always generally tended to use their ccTLDs. .org too has always been run out of the US. If you don't want to be under the US's power, the correct course of action is and always has been to not use the gTLDs like .com, .net, .org that are operated in the US (and that for the first decade plus of existence were operated by the US). These TLDs were simply never country-agnostic; they have always had a much greater association with the US than with any other country. At some point, whatever the intent might have been 30+ years ago doesn't really matter practically speaking today. They are what they are and everyone knows, or should know, what they're getting with them.