Syntactic clustering of the Web
Selected papers from the sixth international conference on World Wide Web
Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain
SP '11 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
Measuring the perpetrators and funders of typosquatting
FC'10 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security
The BIZ top-level domain: ten years later
PAM'12 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Passive and Active Measurement
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After a decade-long approval process, multiple rejections, and an independent review, ICANN approved the xxx TLD for inclusion in the Domain Name System, to begin general availability on December 6, 2011. Its sponsoring registry proposed it as an expansion of the name space, as well as a way to separate adult from child-appropriate content. Many independent groups, including trademark holders, political groups, and the adult entertainment industry itself, were concerned that it would primarily generate value through defensive and speculative registrations, without actually serving a real need. This paper measures the validity of these concerns using data gathered from ICANN, whois, and Web requests. We use this information to characterize each xxx domain and infer the registrant's most likely intent. We find that at most 3.8% of xxx domains host or redirect to potentially legitimate Web content, with the rest generally serving either defensive or speculative purposes. Indeed, registrants spent roughly $13M up front to defend existing brands and trademarks within the xxx TLD, and an additional $11M over the course of the first year. Additional evidence suggests that over 80% of annual domain registrations are for purely defensive purposes and do not even resolve.