Searching for Name Registrars
Guidelines
Check the Acceptable Use Policy:
- Does this registrar censor political or religious speech? Specifically, look up if it censors hate speech, extremist ideology, offensive content, discrimination, or racism. How do they define these words? Often this results in political and religious censorship.
- In many countries, censorship is required by law. In such a case, sysadmins must censor to follow the law. However, a better provider will insist upon a legal court order before it censors.
- What is their abuse policy? Do they notify us first to give us time to respond, before shutting off our services?
- Does the registrar allow: IRC, email, tor, game servers, VPNs, DNS servers, torrents and filesharing
Other Important Criteria:
- Which country is this registrar legally operating in?
- How long has this registrar been operating?
- Does it have a good reputation?
- Can you easily reach customer support?
- What payment options do they accept? Cryptcoins are best.
Send an email to customer support and ask them a few of these questions. If the customer support is friendly and helpful, you can continue researching. If they ignore your questions or are unhelpful, you should find another registrar. If they aren't helpful before the purchase, you can be certain they will be unhelpful afterwards when they already have your money.
Domains
We want a mixture of .com, .net, .org top-level domains and localized country-code TLDs like .uk, .pk, .in, .cn, .ru, .my, .ph, and so forth. We want to spread out and increase the diversity of our domain registrations in different countries to make our network difficult to censor.
We want to avoid commercially owned TLDs owned by Donuts, Google, Amazon, Afilias, and Uniregistry. New domains such as .network, .chat, and .talk may sound cool, but these are owned by private companies who can censor at any time. Most countries have laws protecting freedom of the press and freedom of religion; if your domain is seized unfairly, you can appeal in a court of law. Private corporations offer no such protections. It is therefore safer to register a .com, .net, or .org, or a country-code TLD.
Our current domains include:
| Domains | com | net | org | ru | hk | sg | my | uk | nl | se | il | ph | th | ph | lb | sa | au | tr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ircnow | ✓ | ✓ | ||||||||||||||||
| breadofgod | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||||||||||||||
| nastycode | ✓ | x | x | |||||||||||||||
| lecturify | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Possible Providers
| Website | Location | Notes |
| https://njal.la | Nevis | WARNING: censors right-wing content (left-wing privacy focused) |
| https://epik.com | USA | WARNING: May have been hacked right-wing freedom of speech focused |
| https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/domains | USA | privacy/free speech focused |
| https://dot.ph | Phillipines | Official |
| https://mynic.my | Malaysia | Official |
| https://www.hkdnr.hk/ | Hong Kong | Official |
| http://www.cnnic.cn/ | China | Official |
| https://www.traficom.fi/ | Finland | Official |
| https://www.nominet.uk/ | UK | Official |
| https://cctld.ru/ | Russia | Official |
| https://www.sidn.nl/ | Netherlands | Official |
| http://www.isoc.org.il/ | Israeli | Official |
| http://www.thnic.co.th/ | Thailand | Official |
| https://www.nic.tr/, http://isoc.org.tr/ | Turkey | Official |
| https://www.auda.org.au/, https://afilias.com.au/ | Australia | Official |
| https://www.registry.in/ | India | Official |
| http://registro.br/ | Brazil | Official |
| https://punto.pe/ | Peru | Official |
| https://www.pknic.net.pk/ | Pakistan | Official |
| http://www.nic.cu/ | Cuba | Official |
Free Providers
Free providers are not recommended because they lack a contract and service guarantee. Your domains could be revoked at any time.
Free providers are fun to play with, but don't rely on them for serious work on IRCNow.
- FreeDNS: Commonly used on IRC
Paid Providers
https://www.pipeten.com/support/policy/core/aup/
Factual Accuracy Material published to or transmitted through Pipe Ten’s servers must be accurate where stating facts. Doesn't censor politics but does censor misinfo