Launched generic TLDs that actually have customers owning their domains will never disappear. The worst that will happen is that the registry services will be

Launched generic TLDs that actually have customers owning their domains will never disappear. The worst that will happen is that the registry services will be seamlessly transferred to another operator (as a registrant you likely wouldn't even notice because your interactions are with a registrar, not the registry). See ICANN's EBERO process which ensures that even in the case that a registry operator abruptly fails with data loss, the TLD and all domains on it can still be quickly transitioned to another operator: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/ebero-2013-04-02-en https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/ebero-2013-04-02-en Tl;dr they've thought about how bad for the Internet it would be if TLDs with many users on them could just fail and disappear, so they've taken steps to prevent that from ever happening. There's a reason almost everything on this list is a brand TLD. Your biggest risk as a consumer isn't that your TLD will disappear, it's that the price will be jacked up on it (though this has been happening on .com and .org too).