Was there some sort of assurance that nothing was going to happen when the contract expired, and this expectation was changed? Freenom hasn’t been registering domains since Jan 1.
It’s seeming a little odd to me that this is catching people with their pants down.
From the context of the other two paragraphs, you can narrow down what I meant. Stripped of context it is general, yes.
Not all country code top level domains were free, just a select few. And not everyone used free TLDs, just people with tight budgets who weren’t expecting to make money on their sites, as well as scammers and people who wanted to stay anonymous for other reasons.