The purpose of DNS is to spread scams
Mirrored from Simon Willison for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
6th September 2026 - Link Blog
The purpose of DNS is to spread scams. Terence Eden shares some daunting statistics in support of his take that "the Domain Name System's purpose seems to be a vector for criminals to run scams on people at a terrifyingly high rate".
On this Interisle report (via Andrew Campling), Terence says:
It says 85 million new registrations of gTLDs were made in 2025. Of those 8.5 million were added to blocklists by May 2025. It reckons that a 10% abuse rate is the likely floor for these numbers and it's probably closer to 20%. One in five newly registered domains with a gTLD are scams. That's a bloody crisis.
I had no idea. Apparently ICANN have been discussing this problem for years.
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