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%.
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.