The much-abused .info top-level domain may be making a renewed bid for respectability with policy changes announced this week, in an effort that may make the TLD a little less meaningless.

It's reasonable for the well-traveled reader to feel that it's the net, not the .info TLD, that's the much-abused party here. One of the vaunted TLD class of 2000, .info has over its eight years of existence fallen down the spam-and-scam rabbit hole.

The first unrestricted top-level domain launched during the Web era, .info has over 5 million registered domains -- far more than the restricted 2000 launchees .aero, .biz, .coop, .museum, .name and .pro. It was also the first generic top-level domain to support standards-based internationalized domain names (that is, domain names containing non-ASCII characters). Though not so common in the US, .info domains are well-represented in Russia and parts of central and eastern Africa such as Somalia and Congo.

The wide-open approach led, after an initial land rush in 2001 for interested parties to pick up fresh domains (a process in which "sunrise squatters" were widely accused of blocking rule-abiding parties from fair acquisition), to a notable amount of abuse by speculators and worse.

Concern over .info-supported spam and malware has only grown since Dublin-based registry operator Afilias, the global registry service for the TLD since its creation, renewed its joint registry agreement with ICANN in 2006. In 2007 Afilias began a review of the problem. The results, embodied in the new policy announced Tuesday, clarify what constitutes domain-name abuse and strengthens Afilias' hand in dealing with the bad guys.

Among the activities that'll get domain owners branded as bad guys are phishing, spamming, distribution of child porn, cracking, and running botnets.

Simply making policy, however, might not be enough to clear up .info's shady reputation. Over the years Afilias and various domain registrars (including Yahoo and GoDaddy) may have made the problem worse by aggressively lowering prices, even to around $1/domain -- a very low barrier to entry for the sort of folk who mean to run amuck and don't mind burning through a lot of disposable domains to do so. The amusingly named that-domain-isn-t-in-my-list-of-allowed-rcpthosts.domainregistrtion.com blog summed up the mood with the title of a post written Saturday, before the changes were announced: "Afilias Just Doesn't Get It: Return of the $.99 .Info Domain."

The new policies kick on on November 6.