Dirty Domains Will Do You Dirt Cheap
Take a look at this data from McAfee, and while you're at it, download a free copy of their Site Advisor:
* A consumer is almost 12 times more likely to encounter a drive-by-download [of nasty, harmful malware] while surfing Russian domains as Colombian ones. [You might want to take this opportunity to read about the Russian Business Network, which apparently has now moved to China].
* Registering at a Web site in India results in a 4.3% chance of getting spammy e-mail. Taking the same action with a domain registered in China yields a 7.2% chance.
* 5.2% of Vietnamese Web sites have risky downloads. Just 0.5% of Singaporean sites host such files.
* 2.7 million times every month, casual Web surfers visit risky Dutch Web sites. Even though Hong Kong has approximately the same percentage of risky Web sites, those risky domains receive just 52,000 clicks each month.
Our work with StopBadware.org and the ICANN has taught us that the Web has good neighborhoods and bad.
Go surfing in a bad one and you're likely to get mugged. Unfortunately, a number of those bad neighborhoods correlate with geography, making this topic a difficult one to broach politically from the perspective of international policy. The "country code" domains (like .TV, as we've written about before) are treated as sovereign territory, so nobody does much about countries that don't police their own domains.