The com, net, and org TLDs contain roughly 150 million registered domains, and domain registrants often have a difficult time finding a desirable and available name. In 2013, ICANN began delegation of a new wave of TLDs into the Domain Name System with the goal of improving meaningful name choice for registrants. The new rollout resulted in over 500 new TLDs in the first 18 months, nearly tripling the number of TLDs. Previous rollouts of small numbers of new TLDs have resulted in a burst of defensive registrations as companies aggressively defend their trademarks to avoid consumer confusion. This paper analyzes the types of domain registrations in the new TLDs to determine registrant behavior in the brave new world of naming abundance. We also examine the cost structures and monetization models for the new TLDs to identify which registries are profitable. We gather DNS, Web, and WHOIS data for each new domain, and combine this with cost structure data from ICANN, the registries, and domain registrars to estimate the total cost ofthe new TLD program. We find that only 15% of domains in the new TLDs show characteristics consistent with primary registrations, while the rest are promotional, speculative, or defensive in nature; indeed, 16% of domains with NS records do not even resolve yet, and 32% are parked. Our financial analysis suggests only half of the registries have earned enough to cover their application fees, and 10% of current registries likely never will solely from registration revenue.

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.

Spam-based advertising is a business. While it has engendered both widespread antipathy and a multi-billion dollar anti-spam industry, it continues to exist because it fuels a profitable enterprise. We lack, however, a solid understanding of this enterprise's full structure, and thus most anti-Spam interventions focus on only one facet of the overall spam value chain (e.g., spam filtering, URL blacklisting, site takedown).In this paper we present a holistic analysis that quantifies the full set of resources employed to monetize spam email -- including naming, hosting, payment and fulfillment -- using extensive measurements of three months of diverse spam data, broad crawling of naming and hosting infrastructures, and over 100 purchases from spam-advertised sites. We relate these resources to the organizations who administer them and then use this data to characterize the relative prospects for defensive interventions at each link in the spam value chain. In particular, we provide the first strong evidence of payment bottlenecks in the spam value chain, 95% of spam-advertised pharmaceutical, replica and software products are monetized using merchant services from just a handful of banks.