There are a few ccTLDs that differ from that, though. DENIC and CZNIC are two that are generally very well-run, DENIC even offering better security and safety than many gTLDs (while also being a cooperative, not a commercial NIC, so prices are very low, too)
It is really nice, that the .de domain is seen more as infrastructure than some business. But there are a few downsides to DENIC as well.
1. you need to have a person (juridicial or natural) with an address in Germany to register and list that person as ADMIN-C
2. if you run a website that provide contents which COULD generate revenue, you have to have an Impressum [1] which includes the address, names, etc. of the website owner.
This is pretty annoying if you are sensitive about privacy and do not want your details out in the open.
Agree to disagree. Of the top of my head I can think of several useful things where a public (private) address would be problematic:
1. you want to do something like wiki leaks
2. you want to publish your thoughts anonymously, let's say you are from the LGTB spectrum and want to engage with people by building a forum or blog to communicate with them -> this could lead to potential problems with family, friends and work
3. you have political views and publish them. Now say someone disagrees with your views and is potentially aggressive. Do you want them to know where your family lives?
4. you do not wan't annoying calls by people who crawl the DENIC records (happens to me regularly)
I agree with you that a person should be liable for the stuff they do, but should also be able to engage in open discussion while protecting their privacy. FWIW If someone does bad stuff on a .de domain there are several options:
a) take down the domain via DENIC, or b) take down the domain via ISP or c) take down the domain via Hosting provider
If you really did illegal stuff, I am with you and someone (DENIC, ISP or Host) probably should have the knowledge of the domain owner which could be subpoenaed to lawfully prosecute someone.
making a single person personally liable for content that's hosted on a domain is problematic, to say the least. Go down that path and you eventually end up where the chinese government is now. Where you need a "license" from some ministry to operate an http daemon and you need to hire censors to police all user generated content that disagrees with an authoritarian regime's politics.
I think it's more than a dozen. I would expect all wealthy, tech-savvy democracies to have fairly competently run ccTLDs. It's just that there's about 200 countries in the world, and quite a lot of those are a complete mess.
given the incredible importance to global internet infrastructure of things like the DE-CIX in frankfurt, I am not surprised that the Germans have their shit together when running critical back end systems.
if .ca was not competently run, I'm pretty sure the federal government would step in and put it into the hands of people with real DNS/network engineering credibility.
Unlike the rarely used .us for the USA, it is used for the vast majority of canadian domestic corporations' web identities.
