.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 all tw ...

(ccTLD) for

Equatorial Guinea Equatorial Guinea, officially the Republic of Equatorial Guinea, is a country on the west coast of Central Africa. It has an area of . Formerly the colony of Spanish Guinea, its post-independence name refers to its location both near the Equ ...

. 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. Following Freenom's lawsuit with Meta and its settlement in 2024, it is unclear who will take up registration of the domain, as the company announced it would be exiting the domain business.

Abuse

Due to the lack of cost required to obtain a .gq domain, the

TLD A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domain name, domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the DNS root zone, root zone of the nam ...

has been prone to usage for

spam Spam most often refers to: * Spam (food), a consumer brand product of canned processed pork of the Hormel Foods Corporation * Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages ** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages ...

phishing Phishing is a form of social engineering and a scam where attackers deceive people into revealing sensitive information or installing malware such as viruses, worms, adware, or ransomware. Phishing attacks have become increasingly sophisticate ...

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