Simon Willison’s Weblog

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.