Child abuse becoming big problem for new gTLDs

There were 3,791 domain names used to host child sexual abuse imagery in 2017, up 57%, according to the latest annual report from the Internet Watch Foundation.

While .com was the by far the worst TLD for such material in terms of URLs, over a quarter of the domains were registered in new gTLDs.

Abuse imagery was found on 78,589 URLs on 3,791 domains in 152 TLDs, the IWF said in its report.

.com accounted for 39,937 of these URLs, a little over half of the total, with .net, .org, .ru and .co also in the top five TLDs. Together they accounted for 85% of all the abuse URLs found. The 2016 top five TLDs included .se, .io and .cc.

New gTLDs accounted for a small portion of the abuse URLs — just over 5,000, up 221% on 2016 — but a disproportionate number of domains.

The number of new gTLD domains used for abuse content was 1,063, spread over 50 new gTLDs. Equivalent numbers were not available in the 2016 report and IWF does not break down which TLDs were most-abused.

According to Verisign’s Q4 Domain Name Industry Brief (pdf), new gTLDs account for just 6.2% of all existing domain names, and yet they account for over 28% of the domains where IWF found child abuse imagery.

IWF said that the increasing number of domains registered to host abuse imagery can be linked to what it calls “disguised websites”.

These are sites “where the child sexual abuse imagery will only be revealed to someone who has followed a pre-set digital pathway — to anyone else, they will be shown legal content.”

Presumably this means that registries and registrars spot-checking domains they have under management could be unaware of their true intended use.

Now GNSO mulls emergency response to GDPR deadline

ICANN’s GNSO Council is thinking about deploying a never-before-used emergency mechanism to develop a Whois privacy policy in response to GDPR.

With the May 25 deadline for compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation fast approaching, the community is scrambling to figure out how it can bring ICANN’s policies and therefore its contracts into line with the Draconian privacy provisions of the new law.

Currently, ICANN contracts with registries and registrars demand the publication of full Whois records, something GDPR will not permit, so each company in the industry is busily figuring out how its own Whois database will comply.

Fearful of a “fragmented” Whois, ICANN’s board of directors is considering deploying its own top-down emergency measure — called a Temporary Policy in its contracts — to ensure uniformity across its contracts.

CEO Goran Marby revealed to DI earlier this month that a Temporary Policy was being considered, and he and other members of the board confirmed as much to GNSO leadership during a telephone briefing last week.

(It should be noted that the call took place prior to the receipt last week of guidance from the EU Article 29 Working Party, which prompted ICANN to start mulling legal options as one way to buy the industry some time to comply post-May.)

The call (recorded here with password Eur3wiEK and summarized in this letter (pdf)), focused almost exclusively on how the Council could respond to a board-mandated Temporary Policy, with the board suggesting a GNSO Expedited Policy Development Process might be the best way to proceed.

A Temporary Policy would expire within a year, so the GNSO would have to come up with a formal Consensus Policy within that time-frame if ICANN were to have any hope of having a uniform view of Whois across its contracts.

The Temporary Policy is a “strong option” for the board, and a “highly likely or likely” outcome, but nothing has been formally decided, the GNSO leaders heard from ICANN vice-chair Chris Disspain. He was briefly challenged by Marby, who appeared somewhat more committed to the move.

While the GNSO Council has not yet formally decided to deploy the EPDP, it appears to be the most-feasible option to meet the deadline a Temporary Policy would impose.

It is estimated that an EPDP could take as little as 360 days, compared to the estimated 849 days of a regular PDP.

The EPDP cuts out several of the initial steps of a regular PDP — mainly the need for an Initial Report and associated public comment period — which by my reading would shorten the process by at least 100 days.

It also seems to give the GNSO some wriggle room in how the actual policy creation takes place. It appears that the regular “working group” structure could be replaced, for example, with a “drafting team”.

If the EPDP has the Temporary Policy and WP29 guidance as its baseline for discussions, that could also help cut out some of the circular argument that usually characterizes Whois discussions.

Aware that the EPDP is a strong possibility, the Council is currently planning to give itself a crash course in the process, which has never been used before by any iteration of the Council.

It’s uncharted territory for both the GNSO and the ICANN board, and the only people who seem to have a firm grasp on how the two emergency mechanisms slot together are the ICANN staffers who are paid to know such things.

UPDATE: A couple of hours after this article was published, ICANN posted this three-page flow-chart (pdf) comparing EPDP to PDP. Lots of luck.

Panic stations as Europe plays hardball on Whois privacy

Hopes that Whois records will continue to be available to broad sections of the internet community appeared dashed this week as European data protection heads ripped holes in ICANN’s plan for the industry to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation.

ICANN CEO Goran Marby warned that Whois faces imminent fragmentation and expressed disappointment that authorities have basically ignored his repeated requests for a moratorium on GDPR enforcement.

The Article 29 Working Party, made up of the heads of data protection authorities of EU member states, told ICANN this week that its so-called “Cookbook” compliance plan is nowhere near detailed enough.

In a letter (pdf), it also strongly hinted that intellectual property interests have little hope of retaining access to Whois contact information after GDPR comes into effect next month.

Any notion that WP29 might tell ICANN that the Cookbook was an over-reaction to GDPR, eschewing too many data elements from public records, was firmly put to bed.

Instead, the group explicitly supported ICANN’s plan to replace email addresses in the public Whois with anonymized addresses or a web-based registrant contact form.

It said it “welcomes the proposal to significantly reduce the types of personal data that shall be made publically [sic] available, as well as its proposal [to] introduce alternative methods to contact registrants”.

It also approved of the plan for a “layered” access plan, under which some entities — law enforcement in particular — would be able to access private contact information under an accreditation program.

But WP29 pooh-poohed the idea, put forward by some in the trademark community, that access to Whois could be restricted merely with the use of an IP address white-list.

It warned that the purposes for such access should be explicitly defined and said that what can be accessed should be tightly controlled.

WP29 does not appear to be a fan of anyone, even accredited users, getting bulk access to private Whois data.

While the group endorsed the idea that law enforcement agencies should be able to access Whois, it failed to provide similar comfort to IP interests, security researchers and other groups with self-declared “legitimate interests” in the data.

In what I’m reading as a veiled attack on the IP lobby, the WP29 letter says:

ICANN should take care in defining purposes in a manner which corresponds to its own organisational mission and mandate, which is to coordinate the stable operation of the Internet’s unique identifier systems. Purposes pursued by other interested third parties should not determine the purposes pursued by ICANN. The WP29 cautions ICANN not to conflate its own purposes with the interests of third parties, nor with the lawful grounds of processing which may be applicable in a particular case.

While it would be fairly easy to argue that giving access to security researchers contributes to “stable operation of the Internet’s unique identifier systems”, I think it would be considerably harder to argue that giving trademark owners an easy way to pursue suspected cybersquatters does the same.

In short, the letter clarifies that, rather than complying too much, ICANN has not gone far enough.

WP29 also roundly ignored ICANN’s request for an enforcement moratorium to give the community enough time to come up with a compliance policy and the industry enough time to implement it, irking ICANN into threatening legal action.

Marby said in a blog post yesterday:

Without a moratorium on enforcement, WHOIS will become fragmented and we must take steps to mitigate this issue. As such, we are studying all available remedies, including legal action in Europe to clarify our ability to continue to properly coordinate this important global information resource. We will provide more information in the coming days.

He said that the WP29 statement puts ICANN at odds with the consensus advice of its Governmental Advisory Committee — which, it should be noted, includes the European Commission and most of the EU member states.

The GAC has told ICANN to “Ensure that the proposed interim model maintains current WHOIS requirements to the fullest extent possible” and to reconsider its plan to remove registrant email addresses from public records.

That’s how stupid the situation has become — the same governments telling ICANN to retain email addresses is also telling it to remove them.

Outside of Europe, the United States government has been explicit that it wants Whois access to remain available.

Marby said that an ICANN delegation will attend a meeting of the WP29 Technology Subgroup in Brussels on April 23 to further discuss the outstanding issues.

In a quick response (pdf) to the WP29 letter, he warned that a fragmented Whois and the absence of a moratorium could spell doom for the smooth functioning of the internet.

We strongly believe that if WHOIS is fragmented, it will have a detrimental impact on the entire Internet. A key function of WHOIS allows those participating in the domain name system and in other aspects of work on the Internet to know who else is working within that system. Those working on the Internet require the information contained within WHOIS to be able to communicate with others working within that system.

Reaction from elsewhere in the community has so far comprised variations of “told you so” and hand-wringing about the impact after May 25.

Michele Neylon, head of the registrar Blacknight, blogged that the letter signaled “game over” for the public Whois.

“Come the end of May, public whois as we know it will be dead,” he wrote.

Academic Farzaneh Badii, executive director of the Internet Governance Project and a leading figure in ICANN’s non-commercial users community, blamed several factors for the current 11th-hour predicament, but mainly the fact that her constituency’s lobbying was ignored for so long.

“The Noncommercial Stakeholders Group was the broken record that everyone perceived as not worth paying attention to. But GDPR got real and ICANN has to deal with it,” she wrote.

Matt Serlin of the IP-centric registrar Brandsight, wrote that the letter was “predictable” and said:

The WHOIS system, as it has been known for two decades, will cease to exist. Unfettered access to registration information for gTLDs is simply not going to be possible going forward after May 25th. Yes, there are still questions as to what the final model ICANN puts forth will be, but it will certainly drastically change how WHOIS will function.

Serlin held out some hope that the unspecified legal action Marby has floated may go some way to extend the May 25 GDPR enforcement date.

The community awaits Marby’s next update with bated breath.

Afilias scraps plan to scrap Whois

Afilias has “temporarily suspended” its plan to migrate its TLDs to an essentially thin Whois model.

In what appears to be an effort to roll back some GDPR-related gun-jumping, the registry said it will instead wait and see how ICANN’s efforts to consult with European data protection authorities play out.

Afilias had told its registrars earlier this week that its public Whois output from May 25 will be devoid of any contact information for the registrant, as reported by DNW.

It had said that it would continue to work with law enforcement on access to Whois records, but said that others (such as trademark owners) would not have access until ICANN comes up with an accreditation program.

It was the first major gTLD registry to announce its GDPR plans, but it evidently received push-back.

The affected TLDs were to be: .info, .mobi, .pro, .poker, .pink, .black, .red, .blue, .kim, .shiksha, .promo, .lgbt, .ski, .bio, .green, .lotto, .pet, .bet, .vote, .voto, .archi, .organic and .llc.

Many more client gTLDs would have been able to opt-in to the same scaled-back system.

But the company told registrars today that it wanted to correct “mis-characterizations” of that message and wanted to “clarify that Afilias is not ‘going it alone'”.

Rather, it’s going to hang back until ICANN gets guidance from the EU’s DPAs.

“Importantly, we expect that ICANN’s request for guidance from the data protection authorities will yield helpful input that, in conjunction with the best thinking of the community, will enable a workable solution to emerge,” the Afilias message said.

The company said in a statement sent to DI tonight:

Afilias today announced that it is temporarily suspending plans to limit the display of WHOIS data to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) currently scheduled to take effect on 25MAY2018. Afilias has received a number of questions about its plans, and anticipates that they may be affected by guidance from data protection authorities that has been requested by ICANN. This guidance is expected to be materially helpful in the community’s efforts to resolve the various issues surrounding GDPR requirements.

Afilias is participating in a number of community groups that are considering these issues, including as a principal in ICANN’s pilot implementation of the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP), a potential technical solution for enabling differentiated access to registration data depending on the legitimate purpose of the requestor. For example, law enforcement may need access to certain types of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), trademark guardians to other types, etc. RDAP enables the management of this access in an efficient and effective manner.

As the deadline for GDPR implementation approaches, the community is working diligently in a number of areas to find solutions needed to balance a wide range of community interests. Afilias will continue working collaboratively within these groups in the expectation that appropriate solutions will be reached prior to the GDPR implementation date. Absent guidance from the data protection authorities, Afilias will reconsider its plans as appropriate to ensure compliance with GDPR.

It’s still very possible that Afilias, and other gTLD registries and registrars, could end up gutting Whois in much the same way come May 25 anyway, but for now at least it seems Afilias it willing to play wait-and-see.

As a reminder, there’s going to be an ICANN-supported conference call tomorrow on an Intellectual Property Constituency proposal for a post-GDPR Whois accreditation model.

Whois policy group closes down in face of GDPR

An ICANN working group devoted to crafting Whois policy has closed down “until further notice” in light of the EU General Data Protection Regulation.

The Registration Data Service Policy Development Process Working Group will have no more meetings until it receives “guidance from the [ICANN] Board regarding how this WG will be affected by the GDPR compliance efforts”.

That’s according to WG co-chair Chuck Gomes, in an email to the group this morning. The mailing list will remain active to keep members informed of progress, he said.

The group has been tasked with developing “comprehensive Whois reform”.

It’s been working for over two years to attempt to find consensus on changes such as tiered access and data privacy, the latest iteration of fruitless, fractious Whois policy discussions dating back a couple of decades, and had made very little progress.

Recently, it’s also been hit by infighting and, in my opinion, a sense of helplessness in the face of GDPR, the EU privacy law that will take precedence over any policy ICANN comes up with.

Last month, prominent Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group member Stephanie Perrin publicly resigned from the WG, saying it was “fundamentally flawed” and complaining the process was an “antique” that wasn’t sufficiently taking GDPR into account.

As DI has been reporting for the last several months, there’s very little clarity right now about how GDPR will effect ICANN’s Whois policy.

ICANN CEO Goran Marby told us yesterday that he’s “cautiously optimistic” that EU data protection authorities will soon provide some firm guidance on what it means to be GDPR-compliant.

It appears that the RDS group’s fate may also lie in the hands of the DPAs, for now.