Thanks for enlightening me. I see your point very clearly as I had 3 ‘free’ domains at Dot.tk and they were owned by Dot.tk until I paid for them! Recently I’ve noticed that StumbleUpon social bookmarking site refuses to include them and marks them down as Bad URLs. Google has been tough too. The .tk domain has apparently had some abuse by hackers and malware proliferaters. GD.

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I am curious to understand “what widely accepted as a TLD” really means for .TK.

Last November I inquired about .TK’s registration volume claims. I wanted to know if the active registrations are paid for and registered to multiple organizations vs. a concentration among a smattering of registrants. The response from one of the registry’s founders to a friend of mine was: “Normally we have FREE domains and PAID domains. The FREE domains (more than 1.7 million active domains are currently registered) are all owned by us.”

So while it may be true there are ~1.7 million active registrations, it is difficult to gauge exactly how many were actively registered by an obvious party PAYING FOR IT vs. being registered to the registry operator.

I randomly checked their Whois database and noticed that several well-known marks that are registered in other ccTLDs are also now registered in .TK. However, in many cases the registrant is not who you would think it would be—it is simply listed as a “FREE Dot TK domain name” registered to “BV Dot TK / Dot TK administrator” (the registry operator). Moreover (a few months ago when I checked) some obvious marks registered as free names within .TK were resolving to an active web site that did not seem to be in any way connected to content you would normally expect to see in connection with the mark. In some cases the content linked to other .TK web sites that contain questionable content IMHO.

Heck, I could take over a South Pacific ccTLD and register a load of names to myself as the registry operator and end up as one of the largest ccTLDs in the world also, but that does not mean it’s “widely accepted.”

I do not mean to question the validity of honesty of any legitamate .TK sites, and wish them all the best; but I believe if ZOOKNIC were to provide an additional PAID registration report that it would be a better reflection of what’s really going on in a specific TLD. This is another area in the domain name industry that would seem to call out for transparency, just like periodicals report paid and unpaid circulation statistics.