Some years back, I used to be the proud owner of "libgoliath.so", but then they suddenly decided to hike the price to IIRC Euro 80,- per year (either that, or prove that I have a Somalian citicenship). So I dropped that.
So now I'm the proud owner of "goliath32.com", which I currently keep parked until I finally, hopefully get around to overhauling my 10 year old personal site.
"Price hike", really? I would not exactly call 6.67 euros a month a rip-off. Given your reaction to it, it seems like a very reasonable policy to ensure that people claiming a URL really have plans with it, while keeping out foreigners parking on Somalian webpace for the lulz.
EDIT: some context that is probably relevant to this topic that I should not presume to be familiar with everyone is the controversy surrounding .io domains:
I'm old enough to remember personal websites being a thing, before everyone and their company went over on that Face Site. I had a personal site back than which IIRC 2010 or 2011-ish I moved to the domain I mentioned, and, at the time, I kept updating the site somewhat regularly (before than I had a .de domain, which was really darn cheap and the site was in German only).
The .so NIC "adjusted" the price IIRC around 2014 or so.
Most of the domains I have, or ever had, cost somewhere < 20 Euro per year. Whether this is a reasonable price for occupying less than 100 bytes in someones database (among tons of others, paying for that privilege) is debatable, but is IMO ok-ish.
When it gets closer to Euro 100,- per year (IIRC!) it does start to get painful and I start thinking if that is really worth paying out of my own pocket for my spare time stuff that people nowadays may not even look at at all. At that point I start thinking "I'd rather have a tilde-directory some place and eat a couple Pizzas a year for the money instead".
I migrated that stuff to goliath32.com and, after I simply ran out of time/enthusiasm to maintain a blog, I eventually decided to split the software projects up to a separate, more professional looking place, under "infraroot.at" (a TLD in the country where I live). As I said, I still want to get my act together on the personal stuff and eventually bring the goliath32.com back to live, which I have currently shelved since the interesting stuff was moved elsewhere.
Politics and country matters are something to keep in mind, of course, when you get yourself a fancy two-letter TLD (thanks for pointing out the .io controversy), but please don't try to spin a glorified database entry for which I'm not willing to pay for through my nose into some kind of ad-hominem attack.
There's nothing ad-hominem in my response, I just question your assessment that 80 euros a year is forcing you to "pay through the nose".
Describing these events the way you do makes it sound as if you're being blackmailed or something. You're not. The Somalian government have the right to handle the .so domains however they please. If they demand that people are either Somali or otherwise pay a fee of 80 euros, there is nothing inherently wrong with that. If you find that an unreasonable price, go elsewhere. Nobody is forcing you to buy the domain. Which, as far as I can tell, is what you did.
Basically, what I don't understand is why you describe the event in a way that makes it sound as if they denied you something that you were entitled to when that was not the case.
> Some years back, I used to be the proud owner of "libgoliath.so", but then they suddenly decided to hike the price to IIRC Euro 80,- per year (either that, or prove that I have a Somalian citicenship). So I dropped that.
I don't see any entitlement here at all, just a person calling a ripoff a ripoff.
Governments aren't businesses. They don't, and really shouldn't think of making money first. Top priority should be the interest of their citizens. Besides funding public services and utilities through fees and taxes, governments can use those to incentivize certain behavior, either by making it cheaper than doing otherwise, or by making it more expensive, i.e. penalize it.
I get that (I went to to high school). And I don't have any objections here.
When you buy a fancy ccTLD from a foreign country, you are [most likely] dealing with a government, not a businesses. It is their perfect right to decide that their citizens should be prioritized. They increase the fees 4-fould for anyone without a citizenship to incentivize them to go elsewhere.
When you buy a fancy ccTLD from a foreign country, that's a risk you take and something you should be aware off. That's my whole point.
From my perspective the following happened: I did take that risk. One day, my domain hoster told me to either send them a copy of my Somalian pass port, or I'd have to pay more. So at first I thought, I'll just pony up some more cash then. I already thought that domain prices are mostly fictional, given what I'm really paying for, but then I got a bill that made me go "Smoley Hokes! Now that's a lot of money for a domain name!". I didn't react like you and divided it by 12, rather I started comparing the price tag to other things I would much rather buy for that money, then I started multiplying it, because it's per year and quickly realized that that's just a lower bound, since I have no guarantee, that there isn't another price increase in 2 years or so. So I thought "Well, it's just a personal website, I'll get a domain somewhere else then, better be safe and use a non ccTLD". Even now, if I divide it by 12, I'd still rather buy my favorite take away menu at the Vietnamese place across the street once a month for 6.90.
The registrar giveth and the registrar taketh away. There were no demands made, no tears shed, no curses uttered and no fists shaken. What it boiled down to on my side was a couple minutes of getting a fresh drink, thinking up a new domain name that made me chuckle a little and hacking away.
Seeing a link to a .so domain on HN a couple years later made me remember the whole story and peeked my curiosity. And sure enough, there was a commend devoted to the domain. I chimed in, posting a very brief description of my personal anecdote. I added an extra line, pointing out the new, domain name I got as a replacement, thinking someone might appreciate the joke (it got a few laughs last time I mentioned it, but to be fair, everyone involved was already slightly intoxicated). In my original comment I made no allegations against anyone. I did not discuss the motivations of any of the parties involved (including my own), or local politics in Somalia or any of the socioeconomic implications of this story. I tried to point out, using a personal annecdote, why buying a fancy, foreign ccTLD might be problematic, as a remark on a question asked, foolishly assuming that most of this should be clear and it would be enough to just provide the key details of my story.
I'm sorry if I picked the wrong words or something that have some weird semantics or implications that I wasn't aware of (not being a native English speaker and all), but I have the feeling that I'm suddenly in a situation where I have words put in my mouth and fingers pointed at me, being framed as a freeloading baddie, based on things I never intended to say. That made me slightly annoyed, so sorry if my earlier response was a little harsh.
Choosing any price or deciding to boot non-citizens is their perfect right. Heck, I would even be in favor of country code TLDs only being used for stuff somehow related to those countries. I never claimed anything else, I just tried to point this out, because someone asked (see several postings up).
I'm not running some kind of startup. Outside my work I'm just some guy tinkering with electronics, software and network stuff, and sometimes I write about it on the Web, so naturally I would like to have a catchy domain name with my IRC and IRL nick name in it that people know my by. I went with the .so domain, because it made for a nice play on words, same for the .com domain. Why do I have to justify that all of the sudden?
> or you can use a domain in your home country.
For some of my more involved software projects, that's exactly what I did. It says so right in the post you replied to.
So now I'm the proud owner of "goliath32.com", which I currently keep parked until I finally, hopefully get around to overhauling my 10 year old personal site.