June 01, 2026
19 min read
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 07, 2026
34 min read
We analyzed 29.3 million .pl hostnames in our June 2026 snapshot 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 16.0 percent of every observable .pl hostname, and twenty-eight operators together generate over ten million entries — roughly a third of the namespace. Alongside the infrastructure layer sit Polish shared-hosting platforms (home.pl, nazwa.pl, kylos.pl) and a frozen ecosystem of mid-2000s Polish-language platforms — pinger.pl, digart.pl, fora.pl, republika.pl — that still resolve in 2026, plus 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. Refreshed June 2026 with first-party DNS-resolution data.
May 03, 2026
32 min read
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
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%.
March 23, 2026
30 min read
We parsed 36.3 million observed hostnames in the .nl namespace — rank #11 of 1,511 TLDs. ISP reverse-DNS from Ziggo, XS4ALL, and Chello accounts for a large share of them. The Netherlands — about 17.9 million people — registered the first active country-code domain in 1986, hosts the world's largest Internet exchange, headquarters RIPE NCC, and produced the DNS software that powers the global root. At roughly 2.03 observed hostnames per resident, .nl is the densest national namespace in Europe, and 71.7% of those hostnames return a live A record — well above the 58.9% whole-namespace rate. Refreshed June 2026 with first-party DNS resolution data.
March 23, 2026
19 min read
We observed 400.8 million hostnames under .net — the #2 namespace on the Internet behind only .com — against roughly 13 million registry registrations, a ~30x gap. .net's hostname mass comes overwhelmingly from provider infrastructure: CDN edge nodes, dynamic-DNS, ISP reverse-DNS, and mail/hosting back-ends that mint subdomains by the thousand. And 72.6% of those names return a live A record, well above the 58.9% whole-namespace rate. The TLD created in 1985 for 'network' organizations became literally the Internet's network layer. Refreshed June 2026 with first-party resolution data.
March 20, 2026
22 min read
We analyzed 3.18 billion observed hostnames across 1,511 TLDs to measure .com's dominance — 1.36 billion hostnames, 42.7% of the namespace, one registry operator, zero competition. But only 57.2% of those .com hostnames return a live A record. What a government-granted monopoly means for infrastructure risk, pricing, and the future of the namespace. Refreshed June 2026 with first-party DNS resolution data.