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.de worst TLD for CSAM — report

Kevin Murphy, April 29, 2024, Domain Registries

Germany’s ccTLD, .de, was the worst in the world for hosting child sexual abuse material last year, according to the latest data from the Internet Watch Foundation, which many registries rely on for helping take down such material.

IWF said it found 802 unique .de domains hosting CSAM in 2023, a 1,995% increase compared to 2022. The second and third worst were .com and .ru, with 744 and 691 domains respectively. IWF noted that CSAM domains in .com were down 10% in the year.

Other TLDs in the top 10 were .cc, the non-DNS .onion, .top, .xyz, .pw, .ws and .net. The fastest-grower was Samoa’s .ws, managed by Global Domains International, which saw an increase to 2,966% to 184 unique domains.

.de was also the worst for commercial CSAM operations, IWF said. It found 783 such sites in 2023, all of which “openly displayed images and videos of child sexual abuse on the homepage”. That number in 2022 was zero, the report says.

DENIC gets approved for registry escrow

Kevin Murphy, June 9, 2017, Domain Registries

DENIC is now able to offer data escrow services to gTLD registries, in addition to registrars.
The non-profit company, which runs Germany’s .de, said it gained ICANN approval for the registry escrow function June 6.
Back in March, ICANN approved it for the registrar escrow services.
All ICANN-accredited registries and registrars are contractually obliged to deposit their registrant data with escrow agents in case they go out of business, go rogue, suffer catastrophic data loss, or otherwise screw up.
Nine companies have been approved by ICANN for registry data escrow so far.
Two of others are based in Europe, but DENIC claims to be the only one that offers full compliance with the more stringent German and European Union data protection regulations.

Kredit.com sells for a fraction of Kredit.de

Kevin Murphy, June 15, 2010, Domain Sales

Kredit.com, which means “credit.com” in German, has been sold via Sedo for a fraction of the price that Kredit.de sold for about 18 months ago.
Sedo reported today that the domain changed hands recently for €220,000, which works out to $271,000 at today’s exchange rates.
For comparison, the German ccTLD equivalent, kredit.de, went for €892,500 in December 2008, also via Sedo. At the time, that amount translated to $1.25 million.
A generic ccTLD selling for roughly 5x the .com is a fairly uncommon occurrence, perhaps demonstrating how strong the .de namespace is locally. I can’t imagine such a wide discrepancy in valuations between a generic .com and .co.uk.
Kredit.com was originally registered in 1996. It’s currently parked, with an Irish address listed in the Whois.

German domains see severe downtime

Kevin Murphy, May 12, 2010, Domain Registries

Many domains ending in .de, Germany’s country-code TLD, have seen downtime today, after something went wrong at Denic, the registry manager.
Details are sketchy at the moment, but it appears from chatter on the DNS-Ops mailing list that several instances of the .de zone stopped serving addresses this morning.
It appears that the affected servers were responsible for .de domains beginning with F through Z, so facebook.de would have worked, but heise.de would not.
The German slice of Twitter has been going a bit nuts with comments, and the German press is already on the case.
This is obviously a huge headache if you’re German or do business in Germany — I hate to think how many transactions could have been disrupted by the downtime — and I expect Denic will take a lot of flack at home over the coming days and weeks.
The problem, however, does appear to have been fixed. SANS estimates the outage as a little over an hour.

Google Translate turns ccTLDs into .com

Kevin Murphy, May 12, 2010, Domain Tech

I’ve found Google Translate an invaluable tool for researching overseas news stories, but it’s a pain in the neck for reading about domain names in foreign languages.
The service seems to have developed the habit of turning all freestanding ccTLDs into “.com”.
For an example, head over to Norid and turn on Norwegian-to-English translation (or, if you don’t have the Google Toolbar, use Google Translate on the web).
Every instance of “.no”, Norway’s country-code domain, is translated into a .com, more specifically “. Com”.
Ditto for German. Translate this story about Denic’s troubles today to see all instances of “.de” translated into “. Com”.
However, the front page of Afnic sees .fr translated to “. Com”, leaving .re, for the Reuinion Islands, untouched.
I should point out that the service leaves domain names alone, so nic.fr is still nic.fr. But you’ve still got to wonder what Google’s designers were thinking.