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.CO publishes domain seizure policy

Kevin Murphy, December 1, 2010, 19:51:42 (UTC), Domain Registries

.CO Internet reserves the right to shut down your .co domain name if you’re being naughty.
That’s pretty much what the company has said today with the announcement of its Rapid Domain Compliance Process.

the Rapid Domain Compliance Process gives the .CO Registry the ability to quickly lock, cancel, transfer or take ownership of any .CO domain name, either temporarily or permanently, if the domain name is being used in a manner that appears to threaten the stability, integrity or security of the .CO Registry, or any of its registrar partners – and/or that may put the safety and security of any registrant or user at risk.

While the company has not published full details of how the system works, it seems to be based on security monitoring carried out by Neustar, the registry’s back-end provider, rather than a complaints-driven procedure.
Verboten activities include, as you might expect given .co’s vulnerability to typos, phishing, as well as distributing malware and child pornography.
What’s surprising about this is that .CO Internet is being “proactive” about shutting down sites, rather than waiting to receive complaints to its abuse@ address.
While the announcement is undoubtedly good for the registry’s corporate responsibility image, it also has the potential to backfire horribly if mistakes are made.
Initiatives to block web sites considered security risks almost always lead to false positives.
Even when genuinely criminal sites are taken down, it can lead to loud (if spurious) claims of “censorship”, as we discovered this week with the .com seizures in the US – and they had a court order.
.CO Internet’s policy does not explicitly place piracy or selling counterfeit goods on its naughty list, but it doesn’t rule them out either.
Not to be too cynical, but I give it six months before the first “seized” domain owner cries foul.

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Comments (2)

  1. Michele says:

    I’d be very wary of this. We’ve already seen issues with security companies listing *.domain.tld without any warning and without any sane method of reversing it.

  2. […] During its first several months, .CO Internet has been quite careful about appearing respectable, which is why its domains are relatively expensive, why its trademark protections were fairly stringent at launch, and why it has created new domain takedown policies. […]

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