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Tonga! Tonga! Tonga! Online Piracy’s Unusual Attraction to ccTLD .to
In terms of popularity and daily usage, the mighty gTLD .com and the lesser-known ccTLD .to sit in stark contrast. DomainTools currently reports over 154 million registered .com domains, 129,000 of those registered in the last day alone. Total number of registered .to domains is just 26,000, available from a website that has barely changed in over 25 years. So if we rule out an appreciation of 1997 web design, what fuels pirate sites' enduring love affair with .to?
With limited choice mostly a thing of the past, domain names today are available in many flavors. Above all others, however, the gTLD (generic top-level domain) .com is the most enduring.
Domain Tools data shows that of all TLDs, .com is the stand-out leader with 153,999,258 domains registered at the time of writing.
In distant second place, with 17,195,162 registered domains, is the German ccTLD (country code top-level domain) .de, with .net taking third spot with 12,477,708.
The current ranking of ccTLD .to is only revealed after considerable scrolling; 256th it transpires, with just 26,241 domains currently registered.
For perspective, Zonefiles reports that 129,614 .com domains were registered in the last 24 hours alone. Yet despite relative obscurity, .to domains have always been appreciated by pirate sites and, right now, they’re proving more popular than ever before.
Tonga Does Domains Differently
The Tonic Corporation opened for business in 1997 and during its first day, reportedly sold around 100 .to domains. Anyone who bought a domain from Tonic 28 years ago will appreciate the nostalgia visiting tonic.to today; text aside, nothing has changed
The same applies to the product but that’s not a negative; Tonic’s approach was ahead of its time. As of today, the .to extension still denotes the ccTLD for Tonga, a small island nation in the South Pacific. It’s also still marketed more like a generic global domain than a ccTLD, imposing none of the region-based restrictions or requirements found elsewhere.
The Go .to ccTLD For Pirates?
In 1997, buying a .com domain was a laborious exercise, but Tonic mostly eliminated the form-filling, accepted payment, and registered the domain. When customers register a domain today, Tonic still requests some information relevant to the registration.
It may come as a surprise to those who believe that .to domains are anonymous, but the information requested is fairly comprehensive. Those details include first name, middle initial, last name, billing address, country, email address, plus the all-important credit card details to complete the sale. Perhaps another surprise: if served with a court order, Tonic will hand everything over.
In 2021, the MPA accused Tonic of doing little to prevent pirate sites from using the .to ccTLD, suggesting that it could simply disable domains names if it wanted to. Prominent examples included domains operated by some of the most well-known pirate sites; rarbg.to, fmovies.to, kinox.to, serienstream.to, 1337x.to, torrentgalaxy.to, solarmovie.to, ibit.to, and bs.to.
Tonic was clear, however, that random requests are no substitute for the rule of law.
“The .TO registry complies with court orders from courts of competent jurisdiction, including US courts, and has on many occasions taken down domain names in compliance with court orders,” TONIC’s Eric Gullichsen informed TF.
Since then, MPA/ACE have obtained DMCA subpoenas compelling Tonic to hand over the registration details behind dozens of pirate sites.
What information Tonic discloses is not for public consumption. However, reports suggest that, if information provided by domain registrants isn’t useful, especially when a third-party proxy is the registrant, anything handed over to comply with a subpoena won’t be useful either.
A Small Sample of Big Problems
Over the years, almost 500 .to domains have made an appearance on the UK’s pirate site-blocking list. They include former high traffic domains like watchseries.to, which dates back more than a decade, to relatively young domains popularized in the last five years; bflix.to and onionplay.to, for example.
Given the current trend of treating domains as disposable, to be discarded whenever site-blocking or search engine penalties limit their usefulness, some piracy platforms have stuck to their .to domains through thick and thin.
TorrentGalaxy.to is an obvious example, likewise 1337x.to. If its fortunes hadn’t shifted so dramatically in 2023, it’s likely that RARBG would still be a proud .to domain owner today. Other veteran sites including glodls.to, rlsbb.to, and limetorrents.to, still operate .to domains today.
Some sites, however, make much more noise, even in the face of enforcement action.
Sflix.to: A Single Example From Many
While all major pirate sites are subjected to pressure, streaming site sflix.to has received more than its fair share of attention.
After being blocked by courts in the UK and Australia in December 2021, Sflix.to was added to the PIPCU-maintained IWL (Infringing Website List) in April 2022. It remains listed today in the company of around 80 otherwise diverse domains with the same extension.
Yet, if visitor numbers are any indication of success, Sflix.to easily exceeds the standard.
In October, directly after sites with similar branding were shut down in Vietnam, Sflix.to received 43.8 million visits. By November, that had increased to 49 million visits and then, seemingly out of nowhere, traffic in December collapsed to ‘just’ 23.6 million.
The coincidental debut appearance of sflix2.to in December more than balanced things up; total visits for the month (from a standing start) 57.2 million.
Tonga’s Lure Remains
Sflix.to and other previously mentioned pirate domains are just a few examples, there are many more operational today. Apparently, the .to lure is strong and enduring.
A brief sample of popular and enduring sites, sporting familiar brands and .to domains, is sufficient to show that major pirate sites still prefer .to domains over hundreds of others readily available.
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Our aim is to present current main domains only, so we have excluded a number of high-traffic domains where switches to new, non .to domains are currently underway. The order of the list has no value and by default, all sites should be considered a security risk.
