Can top level domains disappear if countries cease to exist / malfunction?

Question

This question comes from a possibly stupid idea, but I want to make sure its as not-stupid as possible.

I want to tattoo a QR code on my arm, that encodes a website. The domain has to be as short as possible for the QR to be as small as possible. Now I found a nice domain name, but its TLD is .gy.

The tattoo is rather permanent, and I know things on the internet are not always like that.

So my main concern is - what happens if the country governing that TLD ceases to exist? What if they are involved in war? What if there's administrative errors and they fail to keep ownership over their TLD?

I just have a feeling that a .gy domain is much more likely to disappear / malfunction as compared to .com or .nl.

Are those feelings correct? Would it be safer for me to go for a .com domain?

That tattoo would be stupid, but one thats not working anymore would be even more stupid.

EDIT: The deed has been done, and its working great :) I decided to go with an even shorter domain (one that I still had), and one from my own country. Fits great in a 21x21 with "medium" ECC. The URL thats encoded is the following: Click on your own discretion.

Answer 1

Yes, top level domains disappear:

.zr is the former Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Zaire. When Zaire was renamed to Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1997, .zr was phased out and .cd took its place. In 2001, .zr was deleted.1

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.zr

Additionally you might lose the right to renew:

On 29 March 2018, as a consequence of the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union, it was announced that "as of the withdrawal date, undertakings and organisations that are established in the United Kingdom but not in the EU, and natural persons who reside in the United Kingdom will no longer be eligible to register .eu domain names or, if they are .eu registrants, to renew .eu domain names registered before the withdrawal date".

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.eu

Or the price might be increased significantly:

The TLDs seeing the biggest price hikes are .hosting and .juegos (Spanish for “games”) which are going up from about $20 retail and about $10 retail respectively to about $300 apiece. [...] Names in .audio, .blackfriday, .diet, .flowers, hiphop .guitars and .property, currently priced in the $10 to $25 range, will all start retailing for about $100 per year.

Source: http://domainincite.com/21603-schilling-big-price-increases-needed-to-keep-new-gtlds-alive and the user Coburn who was able to provide a source.

As for stability of a western European country vs south american countries: Hard to say. The last two world wars weren't that long ago and were 'centered' in Europe, so who knows where the next 'round' of country and border destabilizing war will be. Also worth noting that QR codes as a way to share hyperlinks won't stay relevant forever either, imagine right now if someone had a tattoo of a usenet group. Point of all of this together is: URLs (and QR codes as a way to encode them) aren't meant in any way to be permanent.

Answer 2

All domains are ultimately controlled by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

From Wikipedia:

ICANN is an American multistakeholder group and nonprofit organization responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several databases related to the namespaces and numerical spaces of the Internet, ensuring the network's stable and secure operation

They assign the registries for Top Level Domains, including the countries. They let the countries decide who their registries are.

In short, nothing is permanent. Countries, registries, or even tattoos.

Answer 3

TL;DR

The TLD will probably outlive the legibility of your tattoo.

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While the other answers address the technical aspect I'd like to address the physical aspect.

• Unless you are being tattooed by a machine then you'd have to bestow a lot of trust in your artist to make it perfect
• Tattoos fade. Do you plan on undergoing this endeavor every decade or so?
• Tattoos blur. I have no idea how this issue would be corrected.
• Once your skin starts wrinkling then will you get Botox in that specific area?
• Consider writing out the URL below the QR code for the aforementioned reasons
• What happens when we switch from HTTPS to HTTPSS or something. Will your old URL be forwarded properly?

Answer 4

It's probably also worth pointing out that perhaps the most infamous example of a tld surviving its country is the .su domain. Only 15 months after it was assigned, the Soviet Union was dissolved into its constituent parts. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.su). Despite dissolution, the .su tld continues to exist and serve sites.

Answer 5

You might not need an exotic 2-character TLD, and could go for a slightly longer .com or .net:

Assuming you are aiming for the lowest resolution QR code (21x21 pixels), you have several options depending on error correction level (see Version 1 in Byte Mode of ISO/IEC 18004:2000(E) standard).

Version 1, Byte Mode, 21x21 pixels:
  EC Low (7%)          http://abcdef.com  (17 chars)
  EC Medium (15%)      http://zyx.com     (14 chars)
  EC Quartile (25%)    abcdefg.com        (11 chars)
  EC High (30%)        abc.com            (7 chars)

The latter two assume most phones will recognize the text as an URL without the http:// prefix (which is true today, but perhaps not in the future).

Not sure what is optimal here: lower resolution with less EC, or higher resolution but more resiliance against faded/malformed tattoo?! In case you decide for more error correction and higher 25x25 resolution:

Version 2, Byte Mode, 25x25 pixels:
  EC Medium (15%)      http://abcdefghijklmno.com   (26 chars)
  EC Quartile (25%)    http://abcdefghi.com         (20 chars)
  EC High (30%)        http://zyx.net               (14 chars)
  EC High (30%)        abcdefghij.com               (14 chars)

Beware that even the 21x21 pixel resolution is already quite high for a human tattoo artist to draw. So make sure your tattoo will be reasonably sized, otherwise the QR code will not work reliably. For example http://abcdef.com:

Answer 6

I think it is pretty safe to assume that when you look for a website to stay online as long as possible, the existence of the TLD is the least of your concerns. When you still have to host the website and ensure that it lives at least as long as your tattoo, chances are that other possible terminating events will occur earlier. Others have discussed the viability of such a thing, so I am going to present other possible and perhaps better options.

The Wayback Machine is a powerful tool to use when looking for a long gone website, but you also have the ability to save any page there. The website may become unavailable for a variety of reasons, but anyone has the possibility to browse its archived version, and also verify that it was indeed yours. Of course the archive may one day cease to exist as well, but that would result in a lot of worse things than the increased stupidity of your tattoo.

Next on the effort scale we have .onion services. These are hosted on the decentralized Tor network, but running one requires very little resources. Any computer connected to the internet will do, but visitors must go through the Tor network to connect, or use one of the public proxies. The advantage is also that nobody will be able to steal or reroute the traffic to the website, as long as you are the sole owner of its private key.

Both of these methods require the device that would read the QR code to understand how to navigate to the desired result, which is not usually available. You can use a URL shortener to compress the size of the (navigable) URL, but there is something better: purl.org. This hosts "permanent" URLs, basically maintanable redirects. You can host the website anywhere and always make sure that the pURL redirects to a working location, or perhaps to the Wayback Machine when you no longer wish to run the website. A lot of important things rely on it already, so if it also becomes unavailable as a service, the consequences will be dire for many people.