Interisle puts the floor for criminal gTLD registrations at 10%, and the likely figure at 20%

Terence Eden reads the numbers out of a new Interisle Consulting study and calls the result a crisis. The study counts nearly 85 million newly registered gTLD domains in 2025. By mid-May 2026, 8.5 million of them — 10 percent — had been added to blocklists. Interisle treats that as the floor: applying projections for later blocklistings and for criminal registrations blocklists never catch, it estimates bad actors bought around 16.8 million domains, or 20 percent of the year’s gTLD registrations. Eden notes the methodology is disputed. Via Simon Willison, who found it through Andrew Campling.

The concentration figures are the ones to hold onto. Five registrars accounted for 50 percent of all blocklisted gTLD domains created in 2025. Some registries and registrars had more than half of their 2025 new registrations blocklisted, in some cases up to 80 percent. Eden counts 13 TLDs above the 50 percent mark and pulls the suspension rate for blocklisted domains out of the report at 7.4 to 16.3 percent. Interisle’s own framing is that “market dynamics and certain industry practices that reward volume sales are contributing to the abuse problem,” and that some registries grew without attracting outsized abuse, so provider practice is the variable.

Swap “domain” for “telephone number” and this is the origination argument in a different registry. Cheap, disposable, instantly usable inventory; intermediaries compensated on volume; a downstream consequence that lands on 7 to 16 percent of the confirmed-bad set. The traceback analogue is exact — knowing which registrar sold the domain has never been the hard part.

Interisle notes new open gTLDs arrive from 2027 onward.