A study into the use and popularity of the Internet's top-level domains (TLDs) over a 10-year period shows that many newer TLDs may present more of a security nuisance for organizations than anything else.
That's according to Farsight Security, which this week released a 182-page snapshot of top-level domain traffic associated with each of 1,576 TLDs recognized by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). The company's findings are based on passive DNS data from 2010 to 2019 and do not include DNSSEC-related records.
The dataset includes traffic associated with generic top-level domains, such as .com, .net, and .org; country-code TLDs, such as .uk, .ca, and .de; new generic TLDs, such as .aarp, .nba, and .abc; and internationalized domain names, or TLDs with non-Latin characters.
One of the main goals of the study was to get a general sense of how broadly popular — or not — various TLDs have become over the past 10 years. While .com is generally perceived as — and actually is — the largest TLD, there's less information on the uptake of other TLDs after IANA began recognizing a lot more of them in recent years, Farsight notes in its report.
"One aspect of this to ask if it was a valuable extension of the namespace or pointless nuisance" to add more TLDs in recent years, says Ben April, chief security officer at Farsight Security. The data around TLD use suggests that the latter might well be the case, he says.
"Overall, the new TLDs aren't thriving," April says. Many have a user population and some even show signs of ..
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