[LINK] itNews: 'Parliament repeals .info filter'

[Scott Howard]

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 8:55 PM, Jan Whitaker <jwhit at melbpc.org.au> wrote:

> I was surprised at this. I did a test searching for:   dog site:.info
> Results: 2,459,000
> Many come up with green safety indicators.
>
> So why are info sites considered dangerous?
>

Historically .info has been abused by spammers and fraudsters, both because
it's relatively cheap (<$1 compared to ~$10 for a .com domain), and
registering "look-alike" domains is easier as there's a lot less domains
registered than .com.  Every Spam/Web filtering program I've worked with
has given a high weighting to .info domains for this reason - not in itself
enough to block them outright, but enough to put them much closer to the
line than say a .com domain.

That's not to say that there's not a lot of valid domains in .info,
although in many cases they are secondary names for the website.  eg, using
your search the first hit I get is for the City of Berkeley at
www.cityofberkeley.info.  The same content is available on their primary
URL of www.ci.berkeley.ca.us.  Many of the rest are personal
sites/blogs/etc, registered due to the availability and price of .info
compared to other domains.

There are exceptions, such as CitiRail and Countrylink trains in NSW, both
of which use .info as their primary domains for some strange reason...

  Scott.