I recently registered a new domain name for a side project, http://recursiveuniver.se. Catchy domain names like this are a little passé, but I’m steering clear of .com indefinitely.
If you have a thought to share, do so with my blessing. A one-liner rhetorical question like this works fairly well in conversation but not as well in a threaded forum where people are looking for a more compact expression of ideas.
There is nothing rhetorical about their question. You are solving the possible US domain confiscation problem by substituting a possible Swedish domain confiscation problem.
While we have this issue with the US declaring it can seize .com domains I prefer the setup rather than turning it over to the UN where it make it near impossible to not have a domain subject to anyone's whim.
Do keep in mind that the U.S. isn't just "another country", it is the center of most big entertainment businesses, and its government is highly, perhaps uniquely, influenced by corporate agendas.
It also has some of the strongest support for free speech in the world, which have held up remarkably well considering the amount of money and vested interest that has tried to get around them. Not fool-proof, obviously, but it is something worth considering when thinking about these issues.
By comparison i would...also they do make great chocolate? Whats not to like...
I've registered a few .it's (Italy) and still maintain a bunch of .com.au's. I dont know, the internet is starting to scare me...maybe avoiding .com isnt a terrible idea, but i have no idea how the others would behave. Likely they wouldn't be much better...
I feel like we're in the 60's of the Internet and soon 'the man' is going to come down on us all and we'll have to get real jobs and stop smoking our virtual weed.
Why? Sounds like cutting your nose to spite your face.
If you had a store to open and all the customers were on "K" street would you not go there because "K" street had a .0001 chance of crime vs. a street with .000000001 chance of crime.
Is there rationality in your decision (for your particular purpose) or are you just protesting against what you see as a potential slippery slope?
But I don’t have a store, therefore I am not cutting off my nose to spite my face. If I did have a store, I would have to ask myself whether being MyRaganwaldStoreDotCom is somehow superior to MyRaganwaldStoreDotSomethingElse.
But until I have that store, I needn’t worry about it. So I don’t see any irrationality here whatsoever.
.com is only valuable because it is a default that is perceived to be valuable, so it could loose value really quickly if it becomes perceived as a risky place to do business, much in the same way as a currency can fall like a stone if it loses trust.
Also, when people access a site, they either type in a domain from a physical source, or more often they search or follow links. Which TLD is used in the domain doesn't really affect this process very much, except in situations of 'passing off'. So perhaps it is a good idea to register the .com, but just not do anything with it.
"so it could loose value really quickly if it becomes perceived as a risky place to do business"
How in touch are you with everyday users of .com domains?
Do you think the majority of the individuals and businesses in this country or in foreign countries are doing things that will make them fear loosing their domains because the US might seize their domain? (These are people that in many cases support racial profiling.)
They won't. I've been dealing with these people since 1995. They don't care.
They use passwords like "football". Then don't read FAQ's.
"Also, when people access a site, they either type in a domain from a physical source, or more often they search or follow links."
Quoting a post on daringfireball (about a story on readwriteweb) that has confused some foreigners hardly proves that "more often they search or follow links".
Dismissal of an argument by laughing at foreigners doesn't do wonders for your point either.
My observations of usage come from working in IT at a wide variety of companies, from corporates to small businesses, including doing customer support at an ISP. I also have been coding HTML since December '93, so am no novice when it comes to the habits of people online. Personally I would say that people use the location bar as rarely as possible, and usually navigate by remembering a path to something, so once they are used to finding a login page through google, they tend to go through the same process again and again rather than typing in the URL, as even though that would be much quicker, it requires more actual thought.
In regards to your post, when it is part of a derisive comment and the aspect of 'foreignness' is used in an attempt to belittle the point you are arguing against, despite not being particularly relevant.
As in; 'X is not really an issue, because in example Y it was mainly happening to foreigners', is very rarely a good argument for the vast majority of values of X and Y.
To second the comment that itmag made, you are simply replacing one country with another. Recall the debacles that happened among the cute .ly TLDs when Libya decided that Islamic law applied to sites like vb.ly.
TLDs are a marketplace. The more customers move around, the larger the economic force exerting influence on countries to behave a certain way. Moving domains by itself is not enough, but it’s a step I’ve taken.
If people sit on their hands and say, “It’s all the same really, no point in doing anything,” then nothing will ever change. You have to vote a certain way, lobby, speak out, protest, write blog posts, and yes, even move domains from one place to a seemingly similar other place if you want to make the world a better place.
I don't think it's particularly that people are not doing anything. If you do think that Sweden will be a more responsible TLD controller, then that is a completely valid answer. Honestly I suspect they would be.
However the point of highlight territorial control of TLDs is just to make it clear that there is such a control that can be flippantly exercised. Which itself argues in favour of alternative DNS systems that are not subject to such anachronistic territorial control. Such an argument can't even begin if people think they can avoid the whole .com thing by moving to a different tld.
