This is one of the main reasons why I’ve been a boring stick in the mud and stuck to com/net/org domain names for stuff I’m that I intend to use for anything that’s going to be around for more than a short period.
Odds are they’re not going to end up vanishing due to things utterly outside the control of, well, anyone or get sold to a horrible steward of them that jacks up prices insanely or does other stupid shit.
I will admit to owning a few .us domains, but as a US-ian, if the .us TLD vanished, I’m pretty sure my domain names would be very, very, very far down the list of shit I’m actually concerned about at that moment.
Yeah, my domains are .com or .us, the .com ones face the outside world for whatever reason and the .us I use to mean “us my family” rather than US, though I’m a citizen so I’m in the clear
If .us suddenly goes somewhere its prrrrrobably true that I am also gone in whatever caused that, too
Exactly this. Another factor in choosing TLDs is that they have different rules. Read those rules closely. Some of them make it much easier for them to take the domain names away from you, for things like copyright infringement, for example. .COM/.NET/.ORG have the strongest rules protecting your ownership, as far as I can recall. This is one of the reasons I stick to those old 3 rather than using newer gTLDs like .INFO, .BIZ, etc.
If the .us TLD vanished, as in, if America ceased to be. I imagine com, net, org, and domains of the like would also be seriously affected since their maintainers as well as the organization with all control over all domains and the root servers would also be affected by such change. The internet could adapt for sure even in the worst case scenario, but with how centralized DNS is it would cause more than a few shakeups. Probably would make this incident look like a drop in the bucket.