I get .tk was popular because it was free and you do need a home for your website that’s portable across providers (not like a .netlify.app sub).
But like we learned from .af, any of these TLDs technically meant for a country need to be considered ephemeral. You are sort of borrowing it without explicit (or lasting) permission.
> You are sort of borrowing it without explicit (or lasting) permission.
To be fair, this is true of all domains. The broader concern with ccTLDs is this borrowing dynamic layered with whatever geopolitical situation the country is in, how stable the administering authority is with respect to the current regime, or just the political forces at work within the country that may lead to changes or requirements for the ccTLD within the country are registered. There is often a concern of DNS infrastructure and local bandwidth considerations for the data center in which the root nameservers are housed, assuming they are not outsourcing that.
It's not true of gTLDs though. You actually own those domains, and they can't be taken away from you (barring extreme circumstances) so long as you pay the registration fees every year. But domains on ccTLDs can be taken away from you by the government at any time for any reason.
I gotta say i find it extremely hard to believe that one can "own" a domain. This sounds like hand-waving. We don't own software, we barely own computers (to do with what we want), we don't own media.
Is this like "one can own land" but really that's asterisked with Eminent Domain (no pun intended)?
Real estate is a pretty good analogy for this, actually. You own domains on gTLDs in the same way that you can own property, but you have to pay your annual property taxes (domain registration fees) else you can lose it. But owning a domain on a ccTLD is more like renting property in a jurisdiction that doesn't have rent control; at any point the actual owner can simply say you're not allowed to use it anymore, and tough luck. Look at what happened to British .eu registrants, for example.
Also you can own all sorts of intangible things, so it's really not that foreign of a concept. You can own parts of the RF spectrum in your country, or mineral rights to a specific piece of land, or you can own a piece of intellectual property or a patent. Domain names are just another flavor of intangible property ownership.
But like we learned from .af, any of these TLDs technically meant for a country need to be considered ephemeral. You are sort of borrowing it without explicit (or lasting) permission.