Blog

Insights on Internet domains, DNS intelligence, and dataset research.

June 13, 2026 18 min read

The IPv6 Mirage: Users Crossed 50%, But Only 1 in 5 Domains Answers — and Cloudflare Generates Half of That

On 28 March 2026 IPv6 crossed half of Google's traffic — the eyeball Internet reached the majority. We pointed an AAAA-typed crawl at 315 million registry domains to measure the other half of the question, and the content Internet looks nothing like it: only 20.4% of domains publish any IPv6 address, Cloudflare alone generates 44.7% of it, and 45% of all domain IPv6 is a CDN edge in front of an origin that may still be IPv4-only. Strip the CDNs and origin-native IPv6 falls to 11%. This is server-side IPv6, measured from 1.88 billion DNS answers.

June 01, 2026 19 min read

Where the Fortune 500 Actually Live: The DNS, Mail, and CDN Stack Behind America's Biggest Companies

We resolved the full DNS, MX, web-edge, and email-authentication stack of 500 Fortune 500 corporate domains against a May 2026 typed crawl. No single vendor owns enterprise DNS — 28% of the F500 still run their own. Proofpoint sits in front of 48% of mail-enabled inboxes. Akamai serves a third of the web edge. And the F500 enforce DMARC at 73% versus ~42% globally — yet MTA-STS reaches just 2.3%. This is the corporate Internet's plumbing, measured from the records themselves.

May 29, 2026 18 min read

A State of TXT: 150 Million Mail Domains, and Why Only 9% Actually Stop Spoofing

We queried the email-authentication TXT layer directly — _dmarc, _mta-sts, default._bimi, and apex SPF — across a May 2026 DNS crawl, using MX records as the denominator. Of 150,020,997 mail-capable apex domains, 71.3% publish SPF, 34.1% publish DMARC, but only 11.7% enforce DMARC and just 9.0% run the minimum credible SPF-plus-enforced-DMARC stack. Two-thirds of DMARC records sit at p=none. MTA-STS reaches 0.144% and BIMI 0.084%. And 45.7% of all DMARC reports flow to a single registrar's default configuration. This is the state of email authentication, measured from the records themselves.

May 07, 2026 28 min read

Poland's .pl: 22.25 Million Hostnames, 2.61 Million Registrations, and the ccTLD That's Forty Percent ISP Reverse-DNS

We analyzed 22.25 million .pl hostnames in our 17 April 2026 active crawl against NASK's 2.61 million registered domains to find that Poland's namespace is dominated by ISP reverse-DNS infrastructure to a degree few European ccTLDs match: Orange Polska's three reverse-DNS zones alone account for 18.1 percent of every observable .pl hostname, and twenty-eight operators together generate over nine million entries. Beneath the infrastructure layer sits a frozen ecosystem of mid-2000s Polish-language platforms — digart.pl, fora.pl, pinger.pl, republika.pl — that still resolve in 2026, and a regional architecture of twenty-three city and voivodeship second-level domains that NASK launched in the 1990s and that, three decades on, account for under 1.5 percent of the namespace.

May 03, 2026 32 min read

The Kubernetes Census Hidden in DNS: 74,508 Apex Domains, 20,420 Cluster Identities, and One Default Value That Owns Them All

We extracted every Kubernetes signal we could find from a 17 April 2026 DNS crawl — heritage=external-dns TXT markers AND CNAME chains terminating in managed-Kubernetes ingress endpoints (AWS ELB k8s-prefixed names, .azmk8s.io, .gke.goog, .openshiftapps.com, .k8s.ondigitalocean.com, etc.). 74,508 unique apex domains carry at least one strict-precision Kubernetes signal (41,565 with TXT markers, 34,219 with strict CNAME pointers, 1,276 in both). 20,420 distinct cluster identities are visible. 13,620 apexes (32.8% of TXT-marker side) use the literal string "default" as their cluster identifier. 815 use the literal example strings from the ExternalDNS README. 6,842 apexes publish a sensitive Kubernetes namespace (argocd, vault, kube-system, istio-system) to public DNS. 1,936 apexes have already migrated to the Gateway API. This is the first combined-signal cluster-identity census of the public Kubernetes footprint.

May 02, 2026 21 min read

The Hidden SaaS Map: What 840 GB of DNS TXT Records Reveal About Who Owns the Internet's Apex

We classified every TXT record from a 17 April 2026 DNS crawl — 840 GB of raw JSONL (56 GB after xz compression) — and built a vendor census from the verification tokens domains leak into DNS. 40.2 million unique apexes carry at least one tracked SaaS verification token. Google's 26.0 million-apex footprint is 3.4x Microsoft 365's 7.6 million. Domain marketplaces (AfterNic + dan.com + 4.cn + Aliyun + west.cn + 17ex + Sedo + DomainEasy) collectively touch 5.0 million apexes — more than Atlassian, Stripe, Adobe, Apple, and DocuSign verification tokens combined. Zoho's 1.23 million is the single largest non-Google, non-Microsoft SaaS verification footprint we measure. The TXT layer is the closest thing the public Internet has to a SaaS census.

April 30, 2026 24 min read

The Dead Web: 1.65 Billion Hostnames That No Longer Resolve

We compared the master DomainsProject corpus (3.12 billion unique hostnames ever observed) against the 17 April 2026 active crawl (1.47 billion currently resolving) and found that 52.9% of the observable web no longer answers the DNS. .com alone holds 808 million dead hostnames; the five Freenom-managed ccTLDs (.tk, .ml, .ga, .cf, .gq) are 99% extinct; the new-gTLD program churns at 75% dead; and a small spine of restrictive ccTLDs — .jp, .it, .de, .nl — sits below 30%.

April 29, 2026 30 min read

France's .fr: 4.32 Million Registrations, 9.27 Million Apex Domains, and the Identity-Verified Professional Namespace That Almost Nobody Uses

We analyzed 20.37 million .fr hostnames against AFNIC's registry data to find that France engineered the most architecturally elaborate national namespace in Europe — nine identity-verified professional TLDs, four regional culture TLDs, six government and sectoral zones — and the verified-profession TLDs collectively generate fewer hostnames than a single small association. Sixty percent of all .fr apexes resolve to exactly one hostname.

April 28, 2026 23 min read

Spain's .es: 2.1 Million Registrations, 10 Million Hostnames, and the Plurinational Internet Behind a State-Owned ccTLD

We analyzed 10.15 million .es hostnames and cross-referenced Red.es registry data to find that one ISP holds 21% of Spain's namespace, the .nom.es personal domain has effectively never existed online, and Spain's national identity is split across four parallel TLDs — one of which got raided by the Civil Guard in 2017.

April 06, 2026 26 min read

The Internet's Lingua Franca: We Classified 1.74 Million Websites Across 54 Country Domains — 64% Are in English

We used LLMSE to classify the language of 1.74 million websites across 54 country-code TLDs and cross-referenced findings with the DomainsProject dataset. 64% are in English — but the number masks five distinct mechanisms driving English prevalence, from colonial inheritance (.in at 95.9%) to outright resistance (.jp at 7.0%). The internet's default language is not a choice most countries made. It is a condition most countries inherited, adopted for commerce, or actively fight.

Page 1 of 3 Older →