No new gTLDs should be added to the internet until ICANN develops policies addressing the abuse of bulk domain name registrations, according to the Governmental Advisory Committee.
The GAC this afternoon drafted formal Advice for the ICANN board stating that policy work on bulk regs should get underway before ICANN 84, which takes place in Muscat, Oman in late October.
While the wording still may change before it is sent to ICANN, the current draft advice reads:
The GAC advises the board: To urge the GNSO Council to undertake all necessary preparation prior to ICANN84 towards enabling targeted and narrowly scoped Policy Development Processes (PDPs) on DNS Abuse issues, prioritizing the following: to address bulk registration of malicious domain names; and the responsibility of registrars to investigate domains associated with registrar accounts that are the subject of actionable reports of DNS Abuse.
The advice on bulk regs is fairly self-explanatory: the GAC has become aware that spammers typically shop around for the cheapest TLDs then register huge amounts of domains on the assumption that some will start getting blocked quite quickly.
The second part of the advice probably needs some explanation: under the current ICANN contracts, registrars have to deal with abuse reports concerning domains they sponsor, but they’re under no obligation to investigate other domains belonging to the registrants of those domains.
So, if a scumbag registers 100 domains for a spam campaign and only one of them is reported as abusive, the registrar can comply with its contract by simply suspending that one domain. The GAC thinks it should be obliged to proactively investigate the other 99 names too.
The advice seems to have been inspired by two sources: NetBeacon’s recent Proposal for PDPs on DNS Abuse (pdf) and data from Interisle Consulting.
Both pieces of advice obviously could have an impact on registrars’ top and bottom lines. They could lose revenue if they currently make a lot of money from bulk regs, and their costs could be increased with new obligations to investigate abuse.
An added wrinkle comes in the GAC’s rationale for its advice, which suggests that dealing with bulk regs and abuse probes should be a gating factor for the next round of new gTLDs going ahead. It reads:
Before new strings are added to the DNS as a result of the next round, further work on DNS Abuse is needed to stem the increasing cost to the public of phishing, malware, botnets, and other forms of DNS Abuse.
The core text of the advice was compiled in furtive huddles on the edges of sessions at ICANN 83, and I believe Switzerland held the pen, but it seems the US government was the driving force behind the push to make abuse a barrier to the next round.
As I reported on Monday, the US GAC rep said that “in light of the global phishing problem… and similar concerns the United States is of the view that we should not expand the DNS too broadly”.
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