A free domain name provider which does not do surveillance, spam?

Although I can't be sure, the answer would seem to be 'kind of, but also kind of not'.

According to the second installment in jxself's DIY server series (https://jxself.org/your-own-server-part2.shtml), which is no doubt as good an authority as one can expect to find, the best strategy is to find a domain registar which is not affiliated with the US or any other problematic superpower. Spam can usually be avoided by filtering of using junk e-mail addresses anyway, and surveillance is unfortunately a side effect of the clearnet's design.

To this end, you *might* be able to find a decent free top-level domain provider at http://www.getfreedomain.name/- I won't vouch for any of them personally since I've never used them, but taking advantage of the fact that domain names aren't evenly distributed amongst nations does seem reasonably solid as a concept.

That said, it seems unlikely any clearnet domain provider is going to be 'acceptable' from a freedom point of view, since the hierarchical nature of domain name allocation means every website owner is inherently dependent on governments or private corporations at some level- almost always the USA, unless you carefully pick your overlords for their independence (jxself recommends .me. and it's hard not to agree given the puns it suggests). The usual advice is the best advice as always- encrypt what you can, avoid using the same provider for different services, think carefully before you act, and opt for security and liberty wherever possible.

name at domain wrote:
> Are there acceptable free of charge domain name providers?

That's a difficult question to answer along the lines you propose because
you'll never really know if your service provider logs activity or uses the
logs for anything but system maintenance until they do what you don't want
them to do.

We can't be sure about anyone we'd recommend because so few people work at
these places (so we don't really know how they operate), and because it's
difficult to determine why someone is advocating for a service provider: is
this the review of a satisfied customer who is in-the-know about such
things? Is this an advertisement for them regardless of what the
organization does? Is this the word of a customer of long-standing who is
ignorant of organizational wrongdoing? Something else?

This applies to so many services as well, not just domain name registrars
or DNS server hosters.

When it comes to gratis services versus commercial services: It wouldn't
surprise me to find that those who give services away gratis are more
likely to get money to run those services from somewhere you might not
like. After all it's not reasonable to expect the service to run everything
they do without money because staff, bandwidth, storage, and computers each
cost money to acquire and maintain.