New gTLDs are becoming less popular, as registrations have fallen precipitously over the last year. Verisign's recently released Q1 2018 Domain Name Industry Brief indicates that new gTLDs represent only 6%, or 20.2 million, of the total of registered TLDs.
The report indicates that active registrations of new gTLDs "decreased by approximately 5.3 million domain name registrations, or 20.7 percent, year over year." Of the top 10 most used new gTLDs, four were listed in Symantec's Top 20 list. Meanwhile, registrations overall increased by 3.2 million, year over year.
[...] Last year, a group of researchers at the Delft University of Technology and SIDN Labs in The Netherlands found (PDF link) that there are "higher concentrations of compromised domains in legacy gTLDs" but that "miscreants frequently choose to maliciously register domain names using one of the new gTLDs." The number of spam domains per 10,000 for new gTLDs was nearly 10 times that of standard gTLDs like .com. However, not all new gTLDs are a problem, as approximately one-third of new gTLDs had zero reported incidents of spam. But, according to the researchers, "Spamhaus blacklisted at least 10% of all 24 registered domains in as many as 15 new gTLDs at the end of 2016."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Saturday June 16 2018, @11:26AM (1 child)
ICANN raised a bunch of money by selling off the right to be the primary registrar on the new gTLDs. Those registrars, in turn, made a bunch of money on the people buying domains to protect their brand. This was never about creating something useful, it was essentially a shakedown of businesses and organizations with name recognition.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @03:22PM
Exactly this. The spam result was predicted, and the plan was objected to, but ICANN saw the dollar signs.