Did you even read the article??
It appears that Meta was aware of Threads before launching its platform of the same name. Company lawyers made four offers to purchase the domain 'threads.app' from Threads Software Ltd from April 2023, all of which were declined. Meta announced Threads in July 2023, the same time that the British company says it was removed from Facebook.
They literally made an offer to buy the domain Threads.app 4 times and got rejected.
Go with Pop!_OS
Very user-friendly and has a straightforward installation process, also comes with strong NVIDIA graphics driver support out-of-the-box if you are using nvidia gpu. Another advantage is the Pop!_Shop, which is akin to an app store and makes software installation easy for newcomers. The GNOME-based user interface is also intuitive and somewhat similar to Windows, easing the transition.
I think using proton service is more for privacy. Nothing is free anyway. If you use Google or anything else that's free, you are paying them with your data, and proton they don't make money from ads, nor do they have them and those servers won't pay itself, but yea their ecosystem is pretty good, I mainly use email and VPN but there is a service called SimpleLogin that basically makes alias for your email, which you can send and receive from, and I believe proton own them now (dont have to pay for it), I basically use that with browser extension that generates random email each time, and we can deactivate the email so no need to bother with unsubscribing from promotional email and all.
Out of curiosity, how is it an issue with ICANN? I know they can complain to them, but what category will this fall under?