The Results of the McAffee SiteAdvisor Survey[via SiliconeRepublic] would seem to justify the rather onerous process of registration maintained by the IEDR.

I would argue that to some extent the Irish Domain has been protected by ’security through obscurity’. National domains are inherently associated with a business strategy: in particular, web-based companies will not want to appear parochial by being associated with a national domain (except where they have branches, like with Komplett.

On the other hand, there are more than 70,000 Irish Domain Names - and we can estimate from McAffee that there are nearly 8,000 harmful .ies. While this seems proportionately good, it remains to be seen if there is a need to refocus the policies of th IEDR to loosen some pre-requisites (for example, those related to personal sites) while tightening others. While the current situation remains, it is hard to imagine the next big-bang web 2.0 site having a .ie suffix.