Why: so your site can’t be taken down by the USA.
At least one .org website that I know of has been shut down because the USA pressured the US organisation that controls the .org domain into doing so.
They could repeat this at will for quite a number of sites.
An immediate step to prevent this possibility, if you run a website, is to register a domain that is controled outside the US.
I have not found one article that just lists them all, and who controls them, but most TLDs have their own wikipedia article, e.g. .org (US controled), .eu (not US controled, yay) etc.
Ultimately ICANN controls all of this, and that’s a US orga too, and Trump could bully them into doing shit, too. But the people who know about these things don’t seem to think that’s a likely threat right now. Also ICANN seems to defer a lot of tasks to exactly these TLD orgas. After all the internet still is (somewhat) decentralized.
Context
https://web.archive.org/web/20260829204913/https://www.inventati.org/campaign/press
Further reading
https://blog.apnic.net/2023/01/13/who-controls-the-internet/
https://netmeister.org/blog/tlds.html
List of all most TLDs created with this script.
… all of them? Pretty much all the root DNS servers are run by USA or US-based companies. The only place where uncle Sam’s hand won’t reach you are the countries that took precautions to isolate themselves like Russia, China, North Korea, etc, but you’d have other hands to worry about, or neo-DNS systems like .onion, .i2p and that crypto thing I don’t remember the name of.