Posts tagged "europe"

6 posts found.

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.

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.

March 23, 2026 15 min read

The United Kingdom's Domain Dilemma: 36 Million Domains, Three Extensions, and a Split That Won't Heal

We analyzed 36.2 million domains in the .uk namespace from our dataset and broke them down: .co.uk holds 83.2%, direct .uk holds 11.3%, and .org.uk holds 5.2%. Twelve years after Nominet launched direct .uk registration, the legacy format still dominates — and the namespace is shrinking. Inside the split, the governance crisis, and why Britain can't unify its corner of the Internet.

March 23, 2026 23 min read

The Netherlands' .nl: 27.8 Million Domains, the Internet's First Country Code, and the Quiet Backbone of Everything

We parsed 27.8 million domains in the .nl namespace from our dataset: ISP reverse-DNS from Ziggo, XS4ALL, and Chello accounts for 28.6% of all entries. The Netherlands — 18 million people — registered the first active country-code domain in 1986, hosts the world's largest Internet exchange, headquarters RIPE NCC, produced the DNS software that powers the global root, and holds the highest ccTLD density per capita among countries with more than 5 million residents. Now the namespace is shrinking for the first time. Inside the infrastructure nation, the hacker culture that built it, and what AI is doing to domain demand.