ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee recently solicited input (again) on the issue of "Dotless Domains." A fellow OARC member asked me if I could generate a list of the top 50,000 dotless domains seen at the root name servers. This type of data is available in the annual Day in the Life of the Internet (DITL) collections that OARC performs annually. I ran the analys is for the April 2012 data. Out of 30.1 billion queries in the data set, 1.76 billion (5.8%) were queries for single-label names. Here are the top 20:
Rank  Count        Query
====  ===========  =====================
   1  287,650,115  local
   2   31,698,784  localhost
   3   16,562,544  wpad
   4   13,367,843  com
   5   12,983,976  ru
   6    8,970,691  _nfsv4idmapdomain
   7    5,490,837  net
   8    4,416,080  \032
   9    4,187,822  org
  10    3,372,632  mail
  11    2,776,746  de
  12    2,658,933  uk
  13    1,940,390  unifi
  14    1,795,716  jp
  15    1,725,496  yotaaccessinterface
  16    1,679,345  mybooklive
  17    1,507,665  pl
  18    1,406,996  http
  19    1,294,151  arpa
  20    1,264,372  helvetica,
Certainly it is no surprise to see some of these names (such as local, localhost, and wpad) in the list. We've seen them before when looking at invalid TLDs. And speaking of TLDs, a few valid TLDs appear in this list. Some of those query counts are likely due to DNSSEC (i.e., querying for the zone's keys). The list gets boring pretty quickly, but one interesting pattern keeps appearing. Note that "\032" represents the space character:
Rank    Count    Query
======  =======  ===========================================
   334  135,063  macbook\032pro
   523   84,155  macbook\032\(agata\226\128\153\)
   743   55,427  steves\032macbook
  1149   34,914  daniela\032grundmanns\032macbook\032pro
  1206   33,018  jan`s\032macbook
  1324   29,777  administrators\032macbook
  1436   28,025  christian\032rahns\032macbook
  1499   27,224  hans\032powerbook
  1584   26,081  ideenautomats\032powerbook\032g4\03215\"
  1607   25,863  jendrik\032hogrefes\032macbook
  1629   25,458  klaus\032gr\195\188nbergs\032macbook\032pro
  1638   25,313  thomass\032macbook\032pro
  1648   25,161  marions\032macbook
  1659   25,049  louisa\032noacks\032macbook\032\(2\)
  1693   24,544  md\032ibook\032\(marcusdinslage\)
  1758   23,552  kramers\032macbook\032pro
  1834   22,468  christians\032macbook\032pro
  1839   22,421  ira\032book
  1842   22,380  hassbook\032\(2\)
  1927   21,460  achims\032macbook
And hooray for IPv6!
Rank  Count  Query
====  =====  =======================================
5189   8812  4f8d:d811:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000
5198   8796  2671:a553:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000
5213   8772  2671:a54d:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000
5237   8730  2671:a550:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000
5250   8705  4f8d:d813:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000
5259   8681  4f8d:d842:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000
5260   8679  2671:a556:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000
5267   8661  4f8d:d840:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000
5270   8659  754f:5c29:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000
5298   8609  4f8d:d844:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000
5312   8590  fe80::20d:60ff:fed4:977c
5313   8590  754f:5c2c:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000
5339   8550  4f8d:d843:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000
You just might be a Unix geek if you recognize these:
Rank    Count    Query
======  =======  ======
    77  499,987  eth0
   118  325,572  eth1
   647   65,009  en0
   982   41,070  eth2
  1672   24,867  fxp0
  9291    5,340  bge1
 29642    2,984  em0
The relative rankings of "eth" (Linux) and "en" (MacOS) is intriguing. You can download the whole list if you like.