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Comment by iandinwoodie | Hacker News Reader

Why is that the most frightening part? (Genuinely curious) I tried to look up the original intent of the .info domain and found the following on Wikipedia: "Info is the only top-level domain that was explicitly created and chartered for unrestricted use, although various other TLDs resulted in this situation de facto." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.info

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Not sure this is still the case, but for years newly-registered .info domains were deeply discounted, i.e. $0.99 or $1.99 for the first year. This made them very attractive for cybercriminals who wanted throwaway domains that weren't needed for more than a year, since they'd be added to spam/malware blacklists within days.

The result was that .info gained a very bad reputation. Since it was so popular among bad actors, but never became very popular for legit sites, for many users the vast majority of times they saw a .info domain it was something nasty.

Exactly - .info and .biz are forever etched in my mind as nothing but scams and spams. I know it has spread beyond that but the original usage was highly tilted toward those.

like bitcoin

FWIW, .biz always has seemed unprofessional-sounding to me. Why that was ever created with the intent of being a legitimate domain is beyond me. It cast a shadow over the whole process of creating those new domains at that time, almost as if ICANN was in on all the shadyness from the beginning. It was as if the WHO or UN started adopting warez terminology — you'd start questioning whether they were what you thought they were.

Almost every time I've seen uBlock Origin block a whole page from loading, and requires adding an exception to browse to it, it's a *.info domain.

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