Generally gTLDs are managed by private companies, not governments; the issue is that every company is under some government's jurisdiction. In this case, .info is managed by Afilias, which appears to be an Irish company and thus .info domains can probably be seized by the Irish government.

http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/info.html http://www.afilias.info/about-us

I missed the whole thing where .com was managed by the US, i thought that's why the .us domain was invented... i don't think anyone outside the US associates a .com meaning US based.

Regardless, stupid law, Team America strikes again!

The company which manages .com is headquartered in the US. This is also true for .org and .net and .us and .gov.

Under US law it is now possible for the US to seize any of these domain names -- and it will continue until the international organization in charge of this system (ICANN) says "oh, that's retarded, we're changing the system so that the US doesn't host .com and .org domains."

We had to fight against two acts proposed in the US which would have made it possible for the US to build a sort of DNS firewall to deny access to other domains from users working within the US -- our own rough draft of the Chinese firewall, if you like. (That was SOPA and PIPA.) But this other right was granted earlier than that, and is now being used to chilling effect.

Wow, thanks, I didn't know that. Why this stuff isn't decentralised is crazy, but at this point I guess there is a lot of vested interest to keep it that way.

EDIT: Just read about BitCoin! Sounding better and better now!

But is seen as a lesser domain by Google if SEO tales are true.

What about .org, piratebay uses that right?

Not anymore, they use .se now.

EDIT: This is wrong, see peteri's post.

.org is essentially the same as .com, owned by the US government and managed by Verisign.

.org is operated by PIR (actually afilias in dublin according to wikipedia) not sure exactly how much leverage the US has over it currently.

I imagine that corporate interests (records, movies) in the US and EU could collude to get a pirate site taken down if it had a .org, it would just be another tree to fall.

So far the US has not publicly tried to drop wikileaks.org, forcing WikiLeaks migrate to a TLD that is clearly outside US reach. Maybe they wouldn't want the bad press.

I'm wondering what is possible if I simply have a relationship with a reseller in the US (e.g. the one with the superbowl ads, or eNom), but my TLD registrar is outside of reach. I assume they could make the reseller drop the contract, or terminate it.

No, you're right. Thepiratebay.org redirects to thepiratebay.se