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Fraud checks coming to .ch as SWITCH renews contract

Kevin Murphy, December 15, 2020, Domain Registries

Swiss ccTLD registry SWITCH has agreed to implement new security measures as part of its contract renewal with the government.

The company said Friday that it has extended its contract to run .ch names with the telecoms regulator OFCOM for five more years, bring it up to December 2026.

But as part of the renewal, SWITCH has agreed to “speed up the adoption and implementation of technical security standards”.

This will involved financial incentives for registrars to adopt DNSSEC, the registry said.

It will also introduce measures to combat fraud at the point of registration, with SWITCH saying “in the event of suspected fraudulent intent, newly registered domain names can be used only after an identity check.”

The policy appears similar to those at other ccTLDs, including .uk, where new regs are flagged under certain circumstances (such as containing coronavirus-related terms) and cannot resolve until further checks are carried out.

Swiss registry gets more traffic than Google, kinda

Kevin Murphy, July 18, 2018, Domain Registries

Switch, the Swiss ccTLD registry, has started publishing a monthly list of the .ch domains with the most DNS traffic, a list that Switch itself currently tops.
The list ranks the top 1,000 .ch domains by the number of DNS resolvers that have queried them over the course of a calendar month.
By that measure, switch.ch is the runaway number one, with 792,958 resolvers. That’s a long way ahead of Google’s google.ch, which comes in at #4 with 529,846 resolvers.
It seems pretty clear that it’s traffic to Switch’s name servers that is likely responsible for its comprehensive lead.
That’s underlined by the composition of the rest of the top end of the list, which is dominated by registrars and hosting companies.
At #2 is the brand-protection registrar Com Laude, a rank seemingly earned due to the fact that the registrar hosts many of its clients’ high-traffic domains (most of which are .com names) on, among others, a comlaude.ch name server.
Switch said its data is collected from its two primary nic.ch name servers and covers all types of traffic. Other such rankings, such as Alexa, measure only web traffic.
By counting the number of unique IP addresses doing DNS queries over the course of a month, Switch said it avoids pitfalls associated with low time-to-live (TTL) settings that could occur if it was counting the number of queries.
More details on its methodology can be found here. The data itself, which goes back 12 months, can be freely downloaded as CSV files here.