I don’t think TFA is talking about hosting email for well-known piracy sites or terrorists. My guess is they are more concerned about arbitrary and capricious account bans for supposed TOS violations, which is more relevant to ordinary people. Your domain won’t be seized by someone because Google doesn’t like your YouTube upload or whatever.
As for political pressure, do we have any examples?
Consider the eBay stalking scandal [1] and ask if those doing the stalking would be willing to bribe or coerce someone to seize the blogger’s domain.
Has ICANN (or registry) ever been bribed or coerced? I understand a low quality registrar can, and can possibly take over a domain, but there is recourse (and punishment such as loss of registrar status) around these situations. I would of course avoid these micronation tlds and stick to well established tlds like com/net/org.
> Has ICANN (or registry) ever been bribed or coerced?
Not that I know of. But it would be quite remarkable for an organization with a global choke point to resist attempts at influence indefinitely.
The upstream comment correctly mentioned owning a domain name being insufficient to be unbannable. There’s no mechanism with owning a domain, or DNS, that’s able to be defended by an individual (nothing like encryption, for example). It’s just someone with more power that allows it, until they don’t.
This is not sufficient. Even your domain can be seized. There is no way for any service dependent on the DNS System to be irrevocably owned.