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No excuses! PIR to pay for ALL registries to tackle child abuse

Kevin Murphy, February 6, 2024, 22:51:52 (UTC), Domain Registries

Public Interest Registry has announced that it will pay for all domain registries to receive alerts when child sexual abuse material shows up in their TLDs.

The non-profit .org operator said today that it will sponsor any registry — gTLD or ccTLD — that wants to sign up to receive the Domain Alerts service from the Internet Watch Foundation, the UK-based charity that tracks CSAM on the internet.

According to the IWF, only a dozen registries currently receive the service, PIR said.

“Our sponsorship will extend access to Domain Alerts to over a thousand TLDs at no cost enabling any interested registry to help prevent the display of criminal, abusive content on their domains,” the company said.

PIR didn’t say how much this is likely to cost it. IWF doesn’t publish its prices, but it seems only paying members usually receive the service. Its membership fees range from £1,000 ($1,259) to £90,000 ($113,372) a year, based on company size.

The partnership also means all registries will have free access to the IWF TLD Hopping List, which tracks CSAM “brands” as they move between TLDs whenever they are taken down by registries in a given jurisdiction.

IWF says that in 2022 it found 255,000 web pages hosting CSAM, spread across 5,416 domains. PIR says it has removed 5,700 instances of CSAM across its portfolio of TLDs over the last five years.

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Comments (4)

  1. Garth Miller says:

    Its a nice PIR initiative. CoCCA has also provided interested users of the CoCCA SRS – 60 ccTLDS, with IWF domain reports under an umbrella agreement with the IWF since Sept 2023.

    • Kevin Murphy says:

      Thanks Garth. Do you think your clients are included in the “dozen” PIR talks about?

      • Garth Miller says:

        Not sure, I suspect CoCCA / Identity Digital etc users are counted as one “registry” in PIR / IWF math. So 12 “registries” might cover most TLDs…

        In any case, it’s a nice move by PIR. There has historically been a commercial barrier that prevented many smaller TLDs from joining the IWF, so it’s nice to see PIR remove that barrier.

        IQ global abuse manager – and I suspect a few other DNS tools also have arrangements with IWF to get reports in a consolidated feed – if the TLD is an IFW member.

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