Spamhaus, a global non-commercial organization, and its rankings of the worst TLDs list have come under criticism from Uniregistry and Famous Four Media, the registrars that manage a number of new TLDs. It is easy to guess that the reason for the criticism is the rankings: the new domains managed by Uniregistry and Famous Four top Spamhaus’s lists on a regular basis, as quoted by Domain Incite. “Spamhaus’s data is not only wholly inaccurate, but are misleading and potentially injurious to the reputation of Famous Four Media,” Famous Four Media chief legal officer Oliver Smith said. Uniregistry head Frank Schilling has made an even more direct statement by saying that Spamhaus has “totally jumped the shark here.”
Although the registrars’ offence is easy to understand, it must be admitted that Spamhaus seems to have mixed things up in its calculations. The organization monitors the level of malicious activity in the domain zones based on its own methods, which are far from perfect. Here’s a simple and obvious example: Several days ago, .diet, a new domain managed by Uniregistry, was on top of Spamhaus’s list of “bad” domains. The share of malicious domain names in it amounted to 74.4%, with the total of number of domain names being some 19,000. According to Spamhaus’s logic, 14,000 of them used spam. But over 13,000 names in the domain zone are registered by North Sound Names, which is owned by Frank Schilling and which markets the registered names as premium, designed for the promotion of the .diet domain. It must be admitted then that over half of these names are malware, which means Uniregistry distributes spam through its own domain zone. This is clearly absurd.
“Spamhaus is a high-minded organization and we applaud their efforts but this report is so factually inaccurate it casts into doubt the validity of everything they release,” Frank Schilling said.
