May 02, 2026
21 min read
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
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
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
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
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.
April 02, 2026
27 min read
We analyzed 13.2 million .io records across 1.59 million unique domains and found a TLD split in two: 6,144 platform domains host 50% of all records, while 335,802 exist as single entries. The tech industry built its infrastructure on a country code belonging to a territory with no civilian population — and the UK's treaty to hand sovereignty to Mauritius puts that infrastructure on a clock no one in Silicon Valley is watching.
March 27, 2026
22 min read
North Korea's .kp holds 329 observed hostnames. Eritrea's .er holds 384. Vatican City's .va holds 1,862. Germany's .de holds 117.7 million. We profiled the smallest national namespaces in our dataset and the impossibly large ones, then ran a DNS-resolution pass — and found that several of the 'biggest' tiny-country ccTLDs barely resolve at all. The ratio between the largest and smallest functional national namespaces is roughly 357,000 to 1. Refreshed June 2026 with first-party A-record data.
March 26, 2026
23 min read
We counted every country-code hostname in our dataset — 971 million observed hostnames across the ccTLD namespace — and mapped them to continents. Europe holds 51% with 497 million from roughly 10% of global population. Africa holds 4.8% raw, but nearly half of that is Freenom free-domain churn that barely resolves; the real African namespace is .za-led and far smaller. We triangulate every continent against our 9 June 2026 A-record crawl to separate national usage from dead inventory.
March 25, 2026
19 min read
We parsed 50.6 million hostnames in the .xyz namespace and found 13.3 million direct registrations generating 37.6 million subdomains. .xyz is the largest new gTLD on Earth and the 4th-largest gTLD overall — ahead of the UK's .uk and level with Brazil's .br. But a fresh DNS pass complicates the 'live infrastructure' story: only 42% of .xyz roots still resolve. The real .xyz is a barbell — a genuine developer and crypto core wrapped in a vast promotional-churn tail. Refreshed June 2026 with first-party resolution data.
March 24, 2026
26 min read
We parsed 52.2 million observed hostnames in the .cn namespace — the world's 6th-largest TLD — and ran a fresh A-record crawl against it. Only 49.0% of .cn hostnames return a live IPv4 address, far below the 58.9% whole-namespace rate and the 70-81% seen across European ccTLDs. China has 1.41 billion people and roughly 0.037 .cn hostnames per person, the lowest density of any major internet economy. The data points to why: a regulatory gauntlet of real-name verification and ICP licensing, a super-app economy where WeChat Mini Programs replace websites, and a namespace where a large share of names are registered or observed but never go live. Refreshed June 2026 with first-party resolution data.