Rafael Sosa’s Weblog

The .info extension is still regarded by many as a SPAM extension. However, .info is also used by many for what it suggests – an information website. The question is, why has .info received the association of being a SPAM extension. The answer lies in the strategy from Afilias to reach high number of registrations by lowering registration costs to pennies. This strategy has been one of the worst moves for the extension and for the web in general. A regular .com registration is about $9 per year. Other extensions follow right along, except for .info offered many times for less than $1. For anyone building a website, $9 per year is an insignificant and highly affordable price. Now, for a spammer who has to run a complicated network of dozens, maybe even thousands of websites with individual domains that regularly get banned by other networks and search engines, $9 per domain gets very very expensive. Here is where .INFO comes to the rescue of spammers. At less than $1, spamming the internet through vast amounts of domains becomes much more cost-effective, mathematically speaking – 9 times more cost-effective.

The solution for the rebirth of .INFO is to raise prices, perhaps even higher than the $9 for a .com. Why would .INFO charge more than a .com? Easy, because there are far more great .INFO domains available for registration than there are .coms. I am not suggesting a ridiculous $100 registration, but $12 or $15 is very reasonable for a one year registration. At this point, a huge curve downwards for .INFO registrations will begin and it will be like the death of all those spamming parasites that have leeched to the .INFO extension. Little by little new life will begin to emerge. Solid information websites will begin to adopt the .INFO extension and the rest will follow. More countries will adopt what Spain and Austria have done with the .INFO extension which is the abbreviation for “Information” in more than 25 languages.