.gq is the

country code top-level domain A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code. All ASCII ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and al ...

(ccTLD) for

Equatorial Guinea Equatorial Guinea ( es, Guinea Ecuatorial; french: Guinée équatoriale; pt, Guiné Equatorial), officially the Republic of Equatorial Guinea ( es, link=no, República de Guinea Ecuatorial, french: link=no, République de Guinée équatoria ...

. Freenom relaunched the TLD on October 1, 2014, and domains became available for free on January 1, 2015. The .gq registry allows the creation of emoji domain names.

History

The .gq domain was launched in July 1997 by GETESA, the nation's prominent internet service provider. In October 2014, domain company Freenom partnered with GETESA to try a business model which involved giving away .gq domain names for free. Before the public launch, there was a sunrise period to allow trademark holders to register their names. Public domain registration commenced on January 1, 2015.

Abuse

Due to the lack of cost required to obtain a .gq domain, the TLD has been prone to usage for

spam Spam may refer to: * Spam (food), a canned pork meat product * Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages ** Email spam Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by ...

phishing Phishing is a type of social engineering where an attacker sends a fraudulent (e.g., spoofed, fake, or otherwise deceptive) message designed to trick a person into revealing sensitive information to the attacker or to deploy malicious softwa ...

and other malicious purposes. A study conducted by internet security company

Symantec Symantec may refer to: *An American consumer software company now known as Gen Digital Inc. *A brand of enterprise security software purchased by Broadcom Inc. in August 2019 {{dab ...

found that 92% of the top 50 .gq websites were being used for "shady" purposes. Out of all of the websites on a .gq domain that were surveyed by Symantec, a whole 98.94% were being used for malicious purposes.

References

External links

IANA .gq whois information
Country code top-level domains Communications in Equatorial Guinea {{compu-domain-stub sv:Toppdomän#G