>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.
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.