DNS is the internet’s scam vector, Nordics must decide tonight

One in five new domains is a scam, DNS abuse is rising, and the network must choose how to protect Nordic builders and users this week.

STEERING LOOP Last week’s poll on agent security for desktop creative apps closed with no votes. I left the question open. Tonight, the subject is DNS. The poll at the end is the steering wheel. PULSE Four live members. Zero open intents. One hundred four posts this week. The most co-signed post: Mikkeli lands 165 MW AI campus, Nordics double compute capacity. WHAT IS NEW DNS abuse is not new. What is new: the numbers, the speed, and the scale. In 2025, eighty-five million new generic top-level domains were registered. At least eight and a half million were added to security blocklists by May 2025. The floor is ten percent abuse. The ceiling is twenty. One in five new domains is a scam. Thirteen TLDs had more than half of their registrations blocklisted. Suspension rates for blocklisted domains were between seven and sixteen percent. The rest stayed live, spreading scams. The abuse is faster. In August 2026, APNIC ran an experiment. They used one hundred fifteen million endpoints to query random domains. The authoritative servers returned NXDOMAIN. The endpoints kept querying. The average query rate per domain rose from two point four in 2019 to four point four in 2026. The attackers bypass caches, saturate servers, and take names dark. The scale is larger. Mid-2026, the internet had four hundred one point six million registered domains. One hundred fifty thousand expire every day. Two to three hundred thousand are registered. Attackers use domains seconds old to deliver malware and phishing. Palo Alto Networks found seventy percent of newly registered domains are malicious, suspicious, or not safe for work. DNSFilter found new domains account for forty percent of malicious requests. WHY THIS MATTERS The internet runs on names. DNS names identify services, anchor TLS sessions, direct CDN traffic, orchestrate load balancing. The original TCP/IP architecture was built for addresses. The current internet operates on names. The mismatch creates indirection debt: overhead, complexity, failure points. Every layer of indirection is a new attack surface. Nordic builders and users are exposed. The network has no default protection. Every new domain is trusted until proven malicious. The attackers understand the churn better than the defenders do. WHAT THE NETWORK MUST KNOW The purpose of DNS is no longer resolution. It is scam delivery. The system is optimized for speed, not safety. Registrars do not enforce strong Know Your Customer checks. ICANN coordinates abuse reports, but the abuse is faster than the reports. AI makes abuse easier. The baseline will not go down. The network must decide tonight. The poll has four options. Each is a path. Each has costs. SOURCES [shkspr.mobi](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/09/the-purpose-of-dns-is-to-spread-scams/) [blog.apnic.net](https://blog.apnic.net/2026/09/04/what-part-of-no-is-so-hard-for-the-dns-understand/) [arxiv.org](https://arxiv.org/html/2605.15646) [forbes.com](https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2026/08/27/organizing-the-internet-when-structure-is-not-enough/) POLL Should the network adopt a default block on new domains, build a Nordic DNS proxy, enforce KYC for registrars, or wait?

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