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There are some domain names that have requirements but nothing like you're thinking. The only one I would automatically consider as providing useful information would be .gov.

I think .gov is actually regulated?
- .gov and .mil are controlled by the American government and they are reserved for use by American government websites and American military websites respectively.
That's kinda wild to me. You'd think there'd be some sort of checks to make sure certain domains are only used by people who have been vetted as reputable.

Though I suppose in the age of misinformation being everywhere it's not too surprising.

Edit: Idk why this is being downvoted but I'd love to know. I'm not very computer savvy. I know more than the average person but I'm not an "IT guy". My concerns come from a lack of understanding. Help me understand.
- Who should do this vetting though? The internet was built up with the idea of technical neutrality - everything else came on top. TLDs came later and were used to either describe the origin of a page or its intended(!) use. That leads to the case that not only can a propaganda outlet mark itself as "info" - it's actually historically correct to do so as it's about what the host wants to communicate.
  
  ICANN, the organisation behind the TLDs, actually always struggles with this btw. A more recent example was the decision which domain should be reserved for local name services. It took y long time (I think years overall) to get to: .internal (edited, brainfart)

Domains have restrictions based on the rules of their registrar, that may be mandated by the government of the associated country.

Some old examples are .gov, .mil, .edu. - I believe that only US Government entities can register with .gov - Not just federal entities but also state and local entities. For example. https://www.sf.gov/ is the San Franscisco City Government site. I've also seen things like https://abcab.ca.gov/ that actually use the hierarchy that was originally intended to exist in domain names. Similarly, .mil is for US military organizations.

.edu must be an accredited institution located in the United States, for example https://harvard.edu/.

If you're in the United Kingdom, you can get a .uk domain, and there appear to be special subdomains with specific use, for example, colleges and universities are .ac.uk, although I don't know the specific details

.com, .net, .org, .info, .biz are all free-for-alls and no one cares if a commercial entity registers a .org or vice-versa.

Trust any information you find on the internet as much as you trust the author. If you don't know personally know the author, well, then, how much do you trust random strangers on the street handing you fliers?

You can read more history on gTLDs at the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain

Not really.
Some regional TLD require you to live there, like .com.au domains for Australia,

Other than that trademarks are iffy. most notably nissan.com did not go to the car brand but a import company

There's quite a bit of info here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains

Some are entirely open, some have usage restrictions like .gov and .edu, some had restrictions but later removed them.

As far as the UK goes, I believe .gov.uk, .ac.uk, and nhs.uk are all regulated and everything else is a free for all..

.net.uk and .ltd.uk are also regulated to some degree. You have to be an ISP (or very similar) for the former and have to provide proof you're a real limited company (by way of company number) for the latter. There may be others.

In fact, I think a company number might have been required to get a .co.uk at one point.

Caveat: This knowledge is mostly from before they opened up the second level for registrations. Originally there was a fixed list of second level domains all under control of the same entity, and they lasted a surprisingly long amount of time before going for the money grab of opening it all up.

I daresay that there are still restrictions on that. I can't imagine they would have let police.uk go to someone other than, you know, the police.

Each Top-Level-Domain (TLD) has its own standards. Most just need your credit card transaction to be accepted. Government, municipal and academic TLD usually need you to be one of them to register a domain for you. Some country TLD require your site to have language or culture related but not always.

Some TLDs do. Others don't. Most commercial ones have very few restrictions. Country code TLDs like .ai or .io or .af may cause issues. I believe .cat is only meant for Catalan content, for instance.

I wouldn't put any porn or feminist activism on the Tslibsn's TLD (.af) and a whole bunch of other countries may not be compatible with other types of websites either.

It's rare that anyone checks, but if you violate the rules and someone reports you, you may be in trouble. Most domain registrars also have rules about your registration contact (name, address, etc.) be accurate and inaccurate information may be enough reason to take your domain from you.

If you buy a domain, you're presented with terms of service. Read them and you'll know the rules that apply.

Yeah, probably best to avoid .af as a domain. Even if you're not hosting content that they'd flag and remove (which is a lot), you're still funding a really backwards country when you do it.

Broadly no but there are some tlds that are controlled entirely by certain entities that don't allow use by people other than them, governments being most if not all of these. Also some countries will only allow residents/citizens to use that nation's tld.

No

The Internet was the Wild West back in the '90s. Anyone could do pretty much anything and there was very little regulation. In the past 3 decades, standards have been popping up to help us build a solid structure for how the Internet works, but a lack of regulation in the beginning led people to believe the Internet was a truly free bastion of information. A place we could share data without going through an institution or government or organization that put their own spin on it first. Which has prevented certain areas of regulation from being enacted, like limiting who can use what root domain names.

Of course, that mindset has backfired since people realized how easy it is to just post false information, and we now find ourselves in an age of misinformation, unable to verify data we find online without a solid reputable organization behind it.

4chan is a perfect example of this. It was originally created under the concept that anyone could post anything and not be censored or banned for it. Their idealism led to many people pushing boundaries with how hateful or violent they could be. Which started as jokes, but then new members came who misunderstood the satire and sarcasm (it's very hard to identify through text only) and took the diatribe as a welcome place to be their truly awful selves. And before we knew it, 4chan became a cesspool of the worst people, who push misleading information to corrupt the minds of their followers and harm large groups of people.

We're in an awkward place where a lot of people want the freedom to continue posting whatever they want without censorship or regulation, while others want data to be regulated and controlled to ensure validity and hold people accountable for their online content. It may be many more decades before we find a solution, but for now, the best thing to do is teach our young students critical thinking skills and how to identify potentially misleading data they find online.

As a sort of historical side comment regarding your concern about misinformation - "how much does it cost to register one?" has been the litmus test to use for a long time (I'm of an age). More specific to .info, it was one of the very first "new" TLDs introduced in 2002/2003 and the owners basically gave away millions of domains for free to gain market share.[1]

This led to a lot of scammers, hackers, malware and whatnot infecting the entire .info TLD and it was in trouble by having the entire thing blocked even around 2012, almost 10 years after introduction.[2] It was troubled with new "crackdowns" (enforcement rules) as well due to it's overwhelming use for nefarious purposes.[3]

Ad-hoc data from my own employment experience, in 2024 it's still 100% blocked (like ref[2]) by corporate firewalls who leverage strict rules along with many others who had the same troubled history (.xyz to name one) and the whole list of "free" domains. However, .info now generally costs $20 USD/yr (with many places offering first year discount for less than $5 USD) so I think it's trying to turn itself around.

Point being, "unrestricted" TLDs which are super cheap have had the historical tendency to attract scammers, phishers, malware and other nefarious entities because the cost of doing business at scale (these guys register hundreds of domains to churn through for short periods of time - "keep moving, don't get caught" i.e.). Having lived through this whole saga, I open all TLDs I know to be cheap/free in private/incognito tabs and treat them with suspicion at first.