Dear Aaron,
The registry policy does not empower Afilias to take away names from registrants just because the registry considers them abusive. Instead, the registry has to demonstrate material deceit (fraud); over the past few months we have done exactly this to numerous registrars when asking them to remove .info domains that are being used for illegal purposes.

When I say illegal - I mean, for example, sites used in phishing, sites used to for malware and spyware, sites that promote child porn, sites that download software (drive-bys) onto unsuspecting users and steal identity -- the kind of stuff that results in jail time or at least heavy fines. We work with the cybercrime units of the FBI, the RCMP (Canada) and with several European agencies to reduce and remove criminal actors from the scene.

Simply increasing the price does not reduce spam. In our experience, most spammers themselves defraud and/or abuse registrars, providing stolen credit card numbers in order to register domain names. By the way, these spammers register more non-.info domain names (com is the most popular) than .info domain names for use in spam. Price does not stop them, since they are not really paying the bill in most cases. We see ccTLDs that cost upwards of $50 that are hit by spammers. If spammers actually pay for their names, your suggested approach might work, but in our experience, spammers don't really care about price as much as they care about whether the registry will take down illegal sites. We're already seeing some early positive results, but it's too early to declare any definitive results from deploying the policy.

Our analysis also shows that the majority of .info domain names in a live, dedicated status are used by countries, businesses and individuals for completely legitimate and useful purposes. For example, see webhosting.info, spain.info, fetchbook.info, mta.info (there are over a million more such useful and completely legitimate .info sites).

I believe that .info sites are a great value and are naturally intuitive - after all, info means information in 37 languages.

Regards,
Ram
EVP & CTO, Afilias

I believe that .info sites are a great value and are naturally intuitive - after all, info means information in 37 languages.

Posted By: AlfredoOs recuerdo que el .cn o el .at han sido utilizados para hacer spam y no han quedado marcados con ese estigma. En su momento Google baneo los dominios que estaban haciendo spam y todo ha quedado en el olvido. No hay que meter todo un tld en el mismo saco>

A top-level domain (TLD registry) will offer domains for under $4. The result will be another TLD blighted by spammy domain registrations.

Posted By: Alvaro1.- Matt no fue a G a trabajar en el webspam team, entro a trabajar en G como cualquier ing. y termino en webspam de rebote. Por lo tanto, la gente ahora le hace caso, y MEJOR hacerle caso, ya que su palabra va a misa dentro de G.

Posted By: Alvaro2.- La prediccion es que otro TLD vendra con dominios > 4$ y que los spammers empezaran a abusar de el, no que todos los TLD de < 4$ vayan a ser abusados por spammy domain registrations.

Posted By: Alvaro4.- Muchos blogspot.com fueron barridos en una actualizacion de G hace tiempo, al igual que muchos otros subdominios/dominios a lo largo de la historia, por eso no es algo que llame tanto la atencion. Con los .info fue la primera vez en la historia que un search engine banea un TLD.

Posted By: Corso... Dale recuerdos. :: el roce hace el dominio ::

Posted By: AlvaroComo ya te dije antes, por ahora no van a banear TODOS los .info, lo que hicieron fue una advertencia disfrazada de un glitch en el algoritmo.

Posted By: CorsoBueno, he modificado el título para hacerlo más neutral.