14 DAY TRIAL // CO.TV, a popular provider of second-level domain names, has terminated its free service after Google removed all domains with this extension from its search engine.
Back in July, Google decided to deindex domain names from several second-level domain (SDL) providers that had history of abuse. These included co.cc and co.tv.
Cyber criminals have abused free bulk domain registration services for years, using them to build redundant infrastructures that were hard for security researchers to take down.
This was also because companies running these services were unresponsive to or simply couldn't cope with the high number of abuse reports.
The search giant hasn't reverted its decision, despite the efforts of the CO.CC owner and probably others to resolve the issue.
It seems that CO.TV has decided to kill free service entirely in order to convince Google to reindex the domain names of its paying customers.
Without the ability to have their website listed on Google it's hard to imagine people willing to pay for any domain name, let alone a second-level one.
Security researchers aren't convinced that this is the best solution or that it will even have any positive results in the short term.
That's because when cyber criminals were concentrated on a few big SDL provider, like CO.CC or CO.TV, it was easier for network administrators to simply block them. Google's decision has spread the abuse over many smaller providers, making it harder to filter malicious pages.
On the other hand, cyber criminals were using co.cc domains mostly as redirectors or landing pages, not as the gateway ones which appear in Google's search results. Legitimate compromised websites are usually being used as gateway pages for their page rank.