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ICANN looking at new bulk reg rules
ICANN seems set to start creating more rules governing DNS abuse, including limits on bulk registrations and more tracking of registrants.
A small team of GNSO volunteers have put together a list (pdf) of dozens of proposed policy change areas, covering everything from registrant data accuracy to pricing to API access to getting ICANN Compliance to be more proactive.
While most of the ideas in the team’s analysis received a broad range of views, it settles on three areas, all related to bulk registration of abusive domains, that it thinks are ripest for further policy work.
The first is “Associated Domain Checks”. The small team think it’s worth looking into whether registrars should have to investigate proactively domains registered by known abusive registrants.
The group also thinks it’s worth looking into better industry information-sharing about domain generation algorithms, which bad actors use to create vast numbers of gibberish names that can be used in spam runs, phishing attacks, or botnets.
Finally, the group thinks rules around API access to registrar platforms should be looked at, given that bulk-registered abusive domains often seem to use APIs to programmatically obtain thousands of throwaway domains in seconds.
The small team thinks a Policy Development Process looking at just these three issues could be completed relatively quickly and the community could address the remaining issues later.
Whether the recommendations go to a PDP is now up to the GNSO Council, which will vote on the matter this Thursday. Assuming the vote passes, which seems likely, ICANN staff would then have to prepare a formal Issue Report, setting out the scope of future work, if any.
A PDP would likely take years to complete.
The three priority topic areas reflect closely the Governmental Advisory Committee advice coming out of June’s ICANN 83 public meeting. Both small team and GAC heavily source ICANN’s INFERMAL research and a recent NetBeacon white paper as their inspirations.
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ICANN’s focus on bulk registration abuse is overdue. Associated domain checks, better info-sharing, and API restrictions could seriously curb bad actors. The challenge will be balancing tighter controls with legitimate high-volume registrants.
While they are all good measures to take, we shouldn’t forget that bad actors will adapt.
Does that mean we stop fighting back Rubens? It has been cat and mouse since the beginning – lets not be negative, rather, lets support any action to combat abuse online and push for more wherever we can
No, it means that expectations need to be realistic. If you played Risk (Hasbro board game) once, you know that you might win in one round just to be attacked from a different country in the next round.
>Does that mean we stop fighting back Rubens? It
>has been cat and mouse since the beginning – lets
>not be negative, rather, lets support any action to
>combat abuse online and push for more
>wherever we can
The are SOME RRs really care about abuse mitigation. They act on reports from ROs in a productive manner.
WELL KNOWN (and big players, RRs and ROs) simply don’t care. And they don’t care because abuse mitigation has a price. And there is de-facto NO penalty for them.
We had dozens of working groups, meetings and calls and ICANN spend a lot of money to feed that farce game – and their players.
>The challenge will be balancing tighter controls with legitimate high->volume registrants.
No. The real challenge behind is to make complex rules with no outcome
There are real fighters at and around ICANN but the whole thing is driven by a few dozen of players.