.TOP Registry is off the ICANN naughty step, almost a year after it became the first registry to be hit by a public contract-breach notice over ICANN’s latest rules on DNS abuse.
The Org took the highly unusual step yesterday of publishing a blog post drawing attention to what it clearly sees as a big Compliance win, ahead of its public meeting in Prague later this month, at which abuse will no doubt, as usual, be a key discussion topic.
ICANN said that it has been working with .TOP for months to put in systems aimed at reducing the abuse of .top domains. It posted:
.TOP Registry expressed its commitment to maintaining compliance with the DNS Abuse obligations and continuously strengthening its abuse detection and mitigation processes through newly established collaboration channels and a structured approach designed to drive ongoing enhancement. ICANN Compliance acknowledged that the remedial measures were sufficient to cure the Notice of Breach. We noted that future violations of these requirements will result in expedited compliance action, up to and including the issuance of additional Notices of Breach.
Compliance had hit .TOP with the breach notice last year over allegations that it repeatedly ignored abuse reports submitted by security researchers, and that it was ignoring Uniform Rapid Suspension notices.
Security outfit URLAbuse later revealed it was the party that had reported .TOP to ICANN.
.TOP is a Chinese registry that sells mainly via Chinese registrars, typically at under a couple bucks retail. A non-scientific perusal of its zone files reveals that the majority of the many thousands of domains it sells every day are nothing but disposable junk — random strings of characters with no meaning in any language.
While .top is far from alone in that regard, it is the most successful at the abuse-attractive low-price-high-volume business model. Its zone grew by almost 1.2 million domains in the last 12 months — the biggest growth spurt of any TLD — and it has just shy of four million domains today.
Despite this implausibly rapid growth, ICANN says that abuse reports for .top domains started falling in April and there has been a “noticeable decrease in reported abuse”.
The Org says it will “actively monitor the effectiveness of these new [.TOP] systems and processes, the Registry Operator’s abuse rankings and their compliance with the requirements.”
The registry has told ICANN it has already “mitigated” over 100,000 abusive domain names with its new systems and processes.
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