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ICANN rules could hamper agentic AI domain regs

Kevin Murphy, July 13, 2026, 12:45:28 (UTC), Domain Policy

Bulk registration of domain names is likely to become more difficult under policy proposals being considered in ICANN, potentially limiting the potential of agentic AI.

The Generic Names Supporting Organization is in the very early stages of a Policy Development Process that aims to “introduce friction” into bulk registration shopping carts for untrusted registrants.

The PDP was initially conceived last year as targeting API-based registrations, which are believed to be often used by Bad Guys to bulk-register domains for abusive purposes like malware and spam.

But the first version of the draft charter that will govern the PDP is now using “technology neutral” language, recognizing that APIs may not be as relevant in future. Bots and agentic AI are not directly mentioned, but it’s clearly what the authors have in mind.

The charter states:

This PDP would seek to introduce a requirement to put safeguards in place to ensure that registrants, particularly new or untrusted accounts, cannot immediately access domain name registrations at scale until they have demonstrated basic trustworthiness.

Quite how the limits would be put in place, what “at scale” means numerically, and how “trustworthiness” would be defined and earned, are all issues that would have to be hashed out by the PDP working group.

Whatever rules are created would be binding on all ICANN-accredited registrars and their resellers.

The PDP working group has yet to be created, and it seems the absolute earliest any agreed policy could be approved by ICANN would be the end of next year, with the rules coming into effect perhaps the following year.

The PDP is set to be the second of the Domain Abuse Mitigation efforts that began last year under pressure from governments and others and studies such as ICANN’s INFERMAL, which discovered that registrars with freely available APIs were far more likely to be abused by ne’er-do-wells.

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Comments (2)

  1. Jothan Frakes says:
    July 13, 2026 at 6:58 pm

    The next PDP after “Associated Domain Check” will be a look at API-based registrations.

    The majority of the marketplace have strong protections in place for reseller systems and API access, and there are are very few registrars that exist whose API registration are made available with loose qualification to create a domain.

    Having some reasonable friction in front of credentialling for API access in order to “raise the floor” should result in ensuring fewer API-based registrations are coming from parties that might exploit weak access limits for creating domains for DNS Abuse purposes.

    — separately
    a minor correction: The way I experienced things, the actual catalyst of these ongoing PDPs on DNS Abuse mitigation were the contracted parties proposing to document their ongoing work.

    Whomever takes the victory lap, the effort is important.

    Reply
  2. Matthias Pfeifer says:
    July 16, 2026 at 7:18 am

    Abuse Mitigation(regarding DN abuse) in the ICANN Universe is more like a Staircase wit. Rules are proposed from those who are not really interested in working solutions so long they have to spent money. Thats just offtopic – RR/ROs API landscape is mature stuff.

    Reply

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