UAE and Palestine? Seriously? UAE has a questionable track record insofar as journalistic freedom is concerned. It ranks #112, below Liberia and South Sudan, in RSF's Press Freedom Index. What if one of the Emirs is offended by what I post on the site? Palestine ranks #153, not to mention you'd have to take Israel into consideration when you do anything Palestine-related.
Gandi.net is an excellent registrar, but I'm not sure about them anymore since they now operate in the UK and US as well. They even have a US-incorporated subsidiary.
Agree. And all of this is ridiculous anyway. A non-issue for the vast majority of startups who want to do something in the US. Think you're going to get funding and grow your company with a foreign TLD doing something that the US government might disapprove of?
Not to mention the fact that the entire OP is based on the way things are TODAY and that assumes it's even accurate. Which of course it's not (just taking your comment as one of many which makes an important point about UAE.)
Most importantly things in the political world can change overnight.
.ch is Switzerland which is great everybody thinks. Guess what? Check out the way the Swiss caved into US demands on revealing those keeping money in swiss bank accounts. Those accounts were secret for a very long time. Then that changed.
> Think you're going to get funding and grow your company with a foreign TLD doing something that the US government might disapprove of?
The web's biggest sites right now (e.g. YouTube and Facebook) are doing things the U.S. government doesn't approve of. They haven't been shut down ... yet ... but Megaupload has, and what's the functional difference between what Megaupload does and what YouTube does?
My point is just that the way the U.S. gov't is going, no decent web application is safe from being taken down. Anything with user-generated content is basically wide open for seizure.
What makes you think the US government doesn't approve of Facebook? Facebook is a gold mine for agencies that specialize in surveillance. Yeah, people sometimes organize protests on Facebook, but the Feds would probably much prefer them to be organized on Facebook than, let's say, on an encrypted foreign website that is more difficult to monitor. Or even Twitter, where people don't post nearly as much personal information as they do on Facebook.
> but Megaupload has, and what's the functional difference between what Megaupload does and what YouTube does?
The difference, at an organisational level, is that MegaUpload is run by a very small team and is "foreign". Google/YouTube, on the other hand, is an American company employing a number of Americans.
The majority of voters probably care little about MegaUpload (even if they should care). But you can be sure they'd care if YouTube was shut down/the domain seized.
What this means functionally is that small startups who do the exact same thing as the industry giants will be the ones targeted and shut down. The logical conclusion is that, if you want to start a web application, it might be worth it to found and host your company outside the US.
>Agree. And all of this is ridiculous anyway. A non-issue for the vast majority of startups who want to do something in the US. Think you're going to get funding and grow your company with a foreign TLD doing something that the US government might disapprove of?
You probably still want to check out your registrars reputation (and put valid info in the whois.) If your registrar has a 'shoot first and ask questions later' attitude, well, you are a lot more screwed than if, say, your web hosting provider is the same.
I mean, the article focuses on choosing your registry, but the registrar is the first point of contact for anyone trying to shut you down. Last time I looked (a few years back) to set up a registrar, you needed to pay a couple kilobucks annually to the registry, plus an additional $6.25 for every .com address you register... every year. With those kinds of costs, and the under $10/year price expectation of consumers, it doesn't take many complaints before what you have to pay humans to read them exceeds the amount of profit you could hope to derive from the customer. Reputation is the only motivation that business would have to do anything besides ignore the complaints until they could not be ignored any more, and then shut down the domain.
And valid contact info is important. You want people to complain to you, not your provider. Most of the time, the powers that be won't move without warning. I mean, yeah, depending on what you are doing, being contactable might not help and might even hurt, but for most things that are at least semi-legitimate, and certainly for anything you want to get venture funding for, being contactable helps a lot.
On that note, if you have /any/ user generated content of any type, pay your hundred bucks and get on the US 'Directory of Service Provider Agents for Notification of Claims of Infringement'
I mean none of this helps if the feds are really after you. But really, I don't know what would, in that case. Best you can hope for is to clear things up so that in the borderline cases they send you scary lawyer letters rather than shutting you down.
I thought the same thing initially, but that's what the person I was interview said. He is the most knowledgeable person I have ever talked to about this sort of thing, as he provides administration services to many, many TLDs: http://www.pch.net/technology/anycast.php
Gandi.net is an excellent registrar, but I'm not sure about them anymore since they now operate in the UK and US as well. They even have a US-incorporated subsidiary.