For businesses, it's not a valid reason to not block .garden simply because a gardening site exists. If a site is important enough, exceptions to the blanket rule can be applied.

In general though, if you want Fortune 500s to utilize your service/company, don't utilize a novelty TLD.

I don't think that anyone claims that there aren't any legitimate sites on .garden, but the risk of using an abuse-prone TLD is that Bayesians are going to assign you an increased prior risk of abuse. Honestly the TLD is making more money from the abusers than from Plantura so they're not going to tighten up their ship, Plantura should probably move to a different TLD.

Further to your point, it harms the existing wonderful sites like https://radio.garden/—which has been featured on HN several times over the past few years.

> First-year TLDs under $2 is one of the best indicators of likely abuse. Some TLDs like .xyz are truly fighting abuse while others feign ignorance.

I don't understand this. The first year being discounted (or free) helped .me, and .xyz in the past. This is one year of data. Surely more time is needed?

> It is unlikely that there are valid business reasons for network environments to allow .garden domains;

What do you mean? What is this likelihood based off of?

> highly recommend defenders completely block the .garden top-level domain, and allowlist items as needed.

Holy overreaction, Batman.

Eh, really?

Like is it stereotyping to say Black people tend to have darker skin than whites?

At some point, it’s not stereotyping, it’s intrinsic. And if the domain is super cheap to register, is overrun by bad actors, and is generally a nuisance… is it really stereotyping?

Collateral damage I get. Like if you’re running a convenience store and observe that teenagers in track suits and bandanas are robbing you blind (hey look I’m stereotyping), banning these kids will also ban the totally legit kid who happens to dress that way.

But? Isn’t that ok? Should the shop owner just eat continued losses for fear that eventually someone might dress like that and not be a risk?

I fear that I sound snarky, but I really don’t mean to. My point is that at a macro level stereotyping is absolutely wrong. But at a tactical, day-to-day lived experience level, how much abuse do we all have to put up with? An unlimited amount ?

It's not just the price, but also how "legitimate" the registrars are and how well they deal with abuse.

Here's an anecdote: I know someone who insisted on using a .tk domain for legitimate business purposes for many years. When I heard of this, I immediately asked "isn't that the TLD managed by a shady company that gives domains away for free and then steals them back if they become popular?" He insisted this did not affect him, as he was a legitimate customer who had been paying for the domain for over a decade.

Fast forward a few years, the company behind the TLD (Freenom/OpenTLD) went under due to their shady business practices, he lost the domain, and was told he had to register it again at a new registrar for a much higher price to recover it.