Check whether your domain's DNS delegation chain stays entirely within EU jurisdiction — from your TLD down to every nameserver in the chain.
Generic TLDs like .com, .net, and .org are operated by US-based registries and fall under US legal jurisdiction. This means US courts, law enforcement, and executive orders can compel the seizure or suspension of any domain under these TLDs — regardless of where the domain owner is located.
Country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) like .fr, .de, .eu, or .nl are governed by registries operating under EU or member state law. A US subpoena or executive order has no direct legal authority over these domains. Seizure requires going through local courts and EU legal processes.
Having a .eu domain is not enough. If your nameservers are hosted under a .com domain, that nameserver's domain can still be seized, effectively taking your domain offline. True sovereignty requires the entire delegation chain to stay within EU jurisdiction.
We check that the domain itself uses an EU or EU member state ccTLD (.eu, .fr, .de, .nl, .it, .es, .pl, and all 27 member states). We also flag EEA/EFTA TLDs like .no, .is, .ch which are under European but not EU law.
We resolve the domain's NS records and verify that each nameserver hostname uses a sovereign TLD. We also resolve the IP addresses of each nameserver to check whether they are physically hosted within the EU.
Like a real DNS resolver, we follow the delegation chain recursively. If your NS is ns1.hosting.fr, we check what nameservers hosting.fr uses, and so on — until we reach a glue record (when a nameserver is hosted under the domain it serves — the ideal terminal point). Every link in the chain must stay within EU jurisdiction.
We report whether the domain uses DNSSEC (cryptographic protection against DNS spoofing) and check the physical hosting location of each nameserver. A nameserver with an EU domain but a US IP address is legally sovereign but operationally exposed.
The US government has repeatedly seized
.comdomains of foreign businesses without prior notice, including online gambling sites, file-sharing services, and entities targeted by sanctions — all by leveraging jurisdiction over Verisign, the .com registry operator based in Virginia, USA.
US authorities have seized domains registered to entities in Spain, Canada, the UK, and other countries. The legal mechanism is straightforward: because Verisign (for .com/.net) and Public Interest Registry (for .org) are US entities, any domain under these TLDs is reachable by US law enforcement.
EU ccTLDs operate under a fundamentally different legal framework. AFNIC (.fr), DENIC (.de), EURid (.eu), and other EU registries answer to their respective national or EU-level regulators — not to US courts.
These are not hypothetical scenarios. US control over gTLDs has concrete, documented consequences for individuals and entire nations.
US sanctions against Iran don't just target the government — they prevent ordinary Iranian citizens and businesses from registering any gTLD domain. The block operates at the registry level: Verisign (.com, .net) and other US-based registries are legally required to refuse domain registrations linked to sanctioned countries under OFAC regulations.
This means that even a European registrar cannot register a .com for an Iranian client — the request will be rejected by Verisign itself. An Iranian entrepreneur, university, or NGO is locked out of gTLDs entirely, regardless of which registrar they use. Their only option is their country-code TLD, .ir. The entire digital identity of a nation of 90 million is constrained by the domestic policy of a foreign country.
The same restrictions apply to residents of Cuba, North Korea, Syria, and the Crimea region — all under comprehensive US sanctions programs.
In August 2025, the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposed sanctions on Nicolas Guillou, a French judge serving on the International Criminal Court. His name was added to the SDN (Specially Designated Nationals) list alongside Al-Qaeda members, drug cartel leaders, and Vladimir Putin.
The sanctions were imposed because Guillou was part of the pre-trial panel that approved arrest warrants against Israeli officials. As a consequence, no US entity may provide him services — this includes domain registries. Guillou cannot register a .com, .net, or .org domain. He was effectively blacklisted from the global banking system.
A sitting European judge, exercising his legal mandate under international law, is denied basic digital services because of the unilateral decision of a foreign government. This is what gTLD dependence looks like in practice.
In 2012, the US Department of Justice seized bodog.com, a Canadian-operated online gambling site, by ordering Verisign to redirect the domain. The company had no US operations — but because .com is administered by a Virginia-based company, that was enough.
The same mechanism was used to seize Megaupload.com (a Hong Kong-based company), dozens of sports streaming domains operated from Spain and other EU countries, and domain names belonging to entities later found to be acting legally in their own jurisdictions. In several cases, domains were held for over a year before being returned, with no compensation for the disruption.
A .fr, .de, or .eu domain cannot be seized this way. The legal process must go through the relevant EU or member state courts, where the domain owner has the right to defend themselves under local law.