Freenom just did something that raises an obvious question: how does a company come back from promising to shut down entirely?
Domain industry outlet Domain Incite reported on July 23 that Freenom has resumed selling domains in three of its old extensions, .tk, .cf, and .gq, starting at €8.22 a year. That single detail, the price tag, matters more than it might seem, because Freenom’s original business model gave these domains away for free, and that free model is exactly what made the company one of the internet’s biggest sources of phishing.
For years, anyone could grab a Freenom domain at no cost and with almost no verification, which made those extensions a go-to choice for throwaway phishing pages and malware links. Security firm Interisle found that five of Freenom’s extensions ranked among the ten most abused top-level domains on the internet in 2021, and by late 2022, Freenom’s domains accounted for more than 60 percent of all country-code phishing domains that security researchers were flagging worldwide.
That run ended when Meta sued Freenom in 2022 and again in 2023, seeking roughly $500 million and accusing the registry of profiting from domains built to phish its users. Freenom stopped taking new registrations almost immediately, and phishing tied to its extensions collapsed, dropping from over 60% to under 15% within months.
The two sides settled in February 2024 on confidential terms, with Freenom agreeing to work with Meta on abuse reports and, notably, announcing it would exit the domain registry business entirely. ICANN pulled Freenom’s registrar accreditation, roughly 12.6 million domains went dark, and both Mali and Gabon took back control of their country extensions.
Now, less than three years later, Freenom is running three of the same registries again, without any public explanation of how that squares with its earlier exit pledge. Meta hasn’t commented publicly. The key difference this time is the price itself: charging even a small fee removes the frictionless, anonymous bulk registration that made Freenom’s domains so attractive to criminals in the first place. Whether that’s enough to keep the extensions clean remains to be seen, especially since Freenom’s own website still advertises the domains as free, with the actual price only appearing once someone starts a search.
