[dns-operations] anti-business hippies (Re: the real reason for ICANN's gTLD expansion seems to be...)

[James R Cutler]

On Jan 3, 2018, at 11:16 AM, Viktor Dukhovni <ietf-dane at dukhovni.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Jan 3, 2018, at 11:25 AM, David C Lawrence <tale at akamai.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> How would you quantify that?  I can see new gTLDs creating new
>>> portals on the internet for bad actors, but I would expect the
>>> number of said bad actors behind them to remain relatively stable.
>> 
>> I suspect that was Kevin's point, trying to suss out whether gTLD
>> expansion is in any way a part of making things worse, or essentially
>> neutral.
> 
> That's difficult to determine without an impossible experimental
> "control".  One might hypothesize that in the absence of the gTLD
> expansion abuse would have gone down, and that the gTLD expansion
> is what enabled it to stay flat...
> 
> -- 
> 	Viktor.

Not only that. One might hypothesize that influence from the increase in available targets and tools far overwhelms any influence indirect pointers to targets may have. The number of stolen mailing lists is likely somewhat larger than the number of <name>.gTLD instances.

As a long-time watcher of Alt-Root attempts and TLD expansion, it seems to me that the primary effect of gTLD expansion is increased income for registrars and registries, not increased SPAM.