Newish gTLDs .tel and .xxx are among the most secure top-level domains

Assigning an “abuse per million domains” score to each TLD, the company found .tel the safest with 0 and .cn the riskiest, with a score of 30,406.

Details at Report names and shames most-abused TLDs

Here's the PDF...
.TEL is #1 at top of domain heap ...
http://architelos.com/wp-content/upl...eport-2013.pdf (see page 4)
with 0 abuse

Whilst that's good news for .tel, you do need to look at what the report is measuring.

To quote http://domainincite.com/13666-report-names-and-shames-most-abusive-tlds

Over 90% of the abusive domains used to calculate the scores were related to spam, rather than anything more nefarious.

Given that the vast majority of registered .tel domains do NOT use an email address of something@mydomain.tel - the setup process is not really for the inexperienced user which .tel mostly targets - then it is hardly surprisng that .tel has not got a spam email problem - and hence scores well !

But a score of zero is good PR all the same !

http://MikeSeaton.tel

I see it with mixed feelings:
.tel is probably the most secure TLD in the world, because it’s impossible to integrate malware.
But:
The security aspect is not very important, because people are searching for content on the internet, not for a safe harbor. If users are cautious, it is very easy to avoid dangers.
The popularity of a TLD is much more important than the security of a TLD.
Even more important is the popularity of a brand like company.com or company.net, but not the TLD.
Users know very well how risky it is to visit a website. They know that a website like cnn.com is secure and a website like porn.com is suspicious. The TLD doesn’t matter.
If a TLD has only about 200,000 registered domains, it is pretty clear that this TLD can’t cause much harm.