This article is pretty light on details. The linked presentation goes into a lot more detail with statistics about which registrars and organizations are the worst offenders etc.

https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2...

> Any additional measures should not require ICANN to assume the role of a global content regulator or criminal-law authority.

> The community should instead consider whether contractual and operational arrangements adequately enable registries and registrars...

Those are things that are easy to say and hard to do. From the perspective of a good faith registrant, the enforcement is already too complex. There are hundreds of registries and thousands of registrars, all enforcing their own interpretation of the rules, so you end up with massive inconsistency.

No one wants their 10+ year old domain revoked for DNS abuse if they've been the victim of a security incident and it got misused, but dealing with that is hard and the economic structure of the industry isn't conducive to "intelligent" handling of complaints. Any solutions will scale the same as big tech with massive, automated systems that turn good faith participants into collateral damage.

A big problem for the domain industry is the way registries are shielded from liability and registrants. The registrars operate on thin margins and take on all the liability and customer support.

I don't think the registries will be given more responsibility. That's based on a personal bias though. I think the industry is set up to benefit the registries at the expense of registrars and registrants.

The registrars are the most likely party to be saddled with extra responsibility and I don't think that's a good solution because they have an economic incentive to look the other way. It's also a weakest link industry so, even if Porkbun, etc. are working overtime to keep bad actors off their platform, there's always someone willing to onboard a scammer for a few dollars.

In my opinion, there should be more talk about a centralized system funded by fees that ICANN collects. As a good faith registrant I want consistent, well defined rules with an appeals process, transparency etc.. I also don't care if I have to pay an extra dollar or two a year for my domains if it improves the industry overall.

Semi-related, does anyone know if there are any lists or decent sources for finding domains that have previously been suspended or put on block lists? That would be useful info for would-be registrants. No one wants to get surprised with a tainted domain.

While I'm definitely not inclined to trust whoever wants to introduce new barriers, part of me actually thinks that the availability of second-level names (e.g. example.com), instantly, for trivially-low prices... maybe you could make a case that we get more harm than good from it.

If you're starting a new commercial venture, something that cost $1000 and took a week would still be one of the cheapest and fastest parts of that process. If you're doing a hobby project or a speculative startup, using a subdomain would be fine. It worked for Altavista.digital.com and Google.stanford.edu.

The argument for shifting (back) to a model like that would be that the hierarchial DNS served as a chain of responsibility. Today a lot of companies irresponsibly use dozens of domains, presumably either because they think people are too stupid to learn to type an additional period in a name, or because their internal dysfunction makes provisioning a subdomain an 11-month project. It's terrible that citibankonline.com, citibank.com, citicards.com, citientertainment.com, citi.com, and citigroup.com are all official domains that Citigroup uses. A user seeing a link to, say, 'citicardbenefits dot com' has zero methods of establishing provenance.

And of course, under conditions where 2LDs were expensive again, 'free subdomains' would certainly still be a thing, as they even back were when .coms were $50 or whatever. We had cjb.net, a bunch of clever '.to' domains, afraid.org, etc.

Under the 'modern' system, the problem of "who do we need to contact about an obvious scam site" has been pushed up to the largest possible scale - the GTLD registries, whereas a scammer abusing a "free subdomain" would be shut down by the admins at that second level.

In the end though, I admit we're stuck with the current way, or, (possibly) some hare-brained KYC scheme that will subject everyone to a high level of government censorship and make anonymity unavailable to good actors who really deserve it.

I agree with the premise but this article doesn't really provide a strong argument. It mentions stats about child exploitation but doesn't show how that's related to gtlds.

Stats about the block list are good (10% of gtld domains are blocked) but thay requires comparing it with a baseline. How many of non gtld domains are blocked?

I have some experience of dealing with this when working for .gov.uk

A registrar can accept an anonymous payment for taxgovuk.gtld and have it live within seconds. The spam messages go out instantly to the victims.

By the time the certificate is seen on the transparency logs and the takedown request sent, it's too late. The criminals have taken what they need and they don't care that the domain is now blocked or on warning lists.

At the risk of sounding too libertarian - do we want domain registrations to be subject to a 24 hour mandatory wait period to see if there are legitimate objections? Should registrars do strong KYC checks on people? Should certain substrings be banned?

I struggle to think of a reasonable way to prevent this which doesn't also harm legitimate users. I don't know what the calculus is between annoying the lawful and frustrating the lawless.

My opinion is that as long as criminal organisations exist, there's no reason they shouldn't be allowed DNS names. That will just help the police track the actual organisation.

The internet DNS system is broken in multiple ways. We would do better to have a shared DHT table with unique keys addressable to names.

Slide 17 is the one people should read before they get on their blog complaining that their emails are rejected by Google and Microsoft. The entities associated with your domain and network, the DNS hosts, registrars, network blocks, and all that each have their own reputation. It is easy for the unwitting to fall in with criminals.

Just just seems like a reason to have a truely distributed DNS system that is censorship resistant. The complaints presented should be _unfixable_ since they are a feature, not a bug.

Why should alleged "cybercriminals" not be be allowed to register domain names? There are procedures of seizing domain names in various countries, and these are in my opinion already somewhat questionable, but the premise of this article seems to go far beyond that and suggest that what they call "malicious actors" should somehow be deprived of infrastructure because they are suspected criminals. The rationale for that is that they later show up on blocking lists...?

That seems beyond any reasonable due process and legal standards. Or am I missing some international legal standard and judicial oversight that would play a role here? I'm genuinely confused.

If you are thinking of launching your own TLD, or second level tld, or effective TLD (like vercel.app). I suggest being creative instead of making yet another TLD with the standard checkbox rules.

If your TLD is location based for example, consider verifying and linking the TLD to an identity, by local means, like a national ID.

gTLDs themselves are a scam, but because it's rich people running that scam it gets a pass

I find that the ccTLD for my country strikes a pretty good balance.

It’s still cheap to register and renew, but requires a traceable real connection to a company or a person:

> 5. Requirements for the applicant - who can apply?

> Organisations

> 5.1 The applicant must be an organisation that is registered in the Norwegian Central Coordinating Register for Legal Entities, see the list of which types of organisations can apply (Appendix E). The organisation must in fact conduct business and/or have activities and a presence according to information specified in the Central Coordinating Register, and it must document its actual existence if Norid requests such documentation. The organisation must have a Norwegian postal address.

> 5.2 Each organisation may at any time subscribe to up to 100 domain names directly under .no. In addition, an organisation may subscribe to up to 5 domain names under each geographic domain to which the organisation belongs, as well as 5 domain names under each category domain to which the organisation belongs.

> Private individuals

> 5.3 The applicant must be over age 18, registered in the Norwegian National Population Register with a Norwegian national identity number and have a Norwegian postal address.

> 5.4 Each private individual may at any time subscribe to up to 5 domain names directly under .no. In addition, a private individual may subscribe to up to 5 domain names under each geographic domain to which the person in question belongs, as well as 5 domain names under priv.no.

https://www.norid.no/en/om-domenenavn/regelverk-for-no/#5.-R...

It works well, and on top of that it is still possible for someone to host content on behalf of someone else to protect the anonymity of that other person, for example by as you said handing out free subdomains to others and handling complaints about scams and other undesirable or illegal things. With all the responsibility and legal liability that doing so incurs.

> If you're starting a new commercial venture, something that cost $1000 and took a week would still be one of the cheapest and fastest parts of that process.

That's highly dependent on where you live.

I don't agree with the 3rd level domain structure. In fact, I don't think ICANN should allow registrars to sell those without clear disclosure informing registrants they're not ICANN domains. At the very least, registrars shouldn't be doing that to their customers.

In terms of abuse handling, you don't want to be a sibling to some unknown person or entity.

> Under the 'modern' system, the problem of "who do we need to contact about an obvious scam site" has been pushed up to the largest possible scale - the GTLD registries, whereas a scammer abusing a "free subdomain" would be shut down by the admins at that second level.

But I want my legitimate domain pushed up to the largest possible scale with a clear set of rules and independence from other registrants. In terms of governance, the average registrant couldn't tell you the difference between a 2nd level domain and a 3rd level domain and the 3rd level domain comes along with additional risk.

As soon as you add 3rd level domains, that's an extra party that can drop your domain. The 3rd level domain providers don't have a standard abuse handling mechanism. I think most of them try to defer to ICANN's rules, but there's nothing that says they must do that. As far as I know, ICANN only deals in TLDs [1].

What happens if you're on a 3rd level domain, there's an influx of abusive behavior by sibling domains, and the 2nd level owner doesn't do a good job of handling it? Does the 2nd level domain get banned by the gTLD? What kind of collateral damage does that cause?

Maybe you create something like the public suffix list, but then it's the same problem with more complexity regarding responsibilities.

I do agree with the general sentiment of letting people pay to prove trust. I think it's really hard to come up with a number that makes sense, but I'd be willing to pay $X into an abuse handling fund if it bought me extra trust for my domain(s).

1. https://www.icann.org/en/contracted-parties/registry-operato...

> It mentions stats about child exploitation but doesn't show how that's related to gtlds.

Yeah, I wondered about that too. Any young people I know can barely tell you what a domain is. They're not directly visiting websites AFAIK and I don't think any of the platforms require a domain to participate.

> 9% experience online sexual extortion before the age of 18

That's an astronomical number and I'd assume it has to be an overall total. I hate those kinds of statistics because they're not telling you what you really need to know to make an informed decision. What's the percentage that involved a gTLD?

To me, this smells a bit like another effort at usurping control of the flow of information. Domains are an incredible tool for independence and the fact they've been co-opted by bad actors provides a great opportunity for a select few to seize control over what we're allowed to do with them :-(

They've made no effort to give normal participants an edge over the scammers and jump straight to censorship / control.

For example, consider that person on here with 'web.one' the other day. Why doesn't their expensive, premium domain include an increased level of trust and reputation?

If they want to do KYC, I think that's fine, but it should be an opt in system like the old EV certificates used to be. I don't need KYC and a bunch of controls to self-host things that no one else uses.

The problem with EV certificates is they became a money printing scam for the CAs. Plus, and this is an opinion, I think the platforms like Google and Facebook went out of their way to kill EV because damaging a trust indicator for domains benefits them when there are scams everywhere (as we're seeing now) and people need the platforms to "protect them" rather than having a fundamental understanding of how to evaluate risks on their own.

How would you decide what is legitimate ?

Better would be a "this site is suspiciously new" warning in browsers.

At $WORK, newly registered sites are blocked by default by the network appliance.

On the other hand, I struggle to think of a reason how harm could come from delayed activation of a registered public name. Can you describe a use case that cannot be solved by opting for a subdomain of an already-existing domain?

> At the risk of sounding too libertarian - do we want domain registrations to be subject to a 24 hour mandatory wait period to see if there are legitimate objections? Should registrars do strong KYC checks on people? Should certain substrings be banned?

I'd say "legitimate objections" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there and I don't like the idea. Having the time and resources to monitor registrations becomes a barrier and that makes it a time and resource based system. IE: Rich individuals and companies can pay a monitoring service that objects very broadly.

I've always been frustrated by systems like that and it seems like a lot of the tech industry is set up that way. I've had my personal, family name, 25 year old domain put on Google's safe browsing block list and being the collateral damage in a hugely scaled system isn't fun. Spending the time and resources needed to deal with it are far more of a burden for me than for a big company. I was able to get it removed, but why should I be forced to pay for their mistake?

Ultimately though, any system is going to cost money no matter how it's structured. If you're not paying directly, you're spending time or resources of some kind. I'd rather pay directly because it's easier to understand.

I don't think you can build an all or none system for handling abuse because so much of it is subjective. Even using what's legal vs illegal is difficult because a global system is going to have contradictions. Online gambling is a good example. Some countries would want the related domains banned for being illegal while others don't have a problem with it.

Domains are one of the core building blocks that makes a decentralized internet work. Adding strong moderation tools to that is a huge risk because moderation and censorship are closely related. Who determines what's trustworthy or legitimate or abuse or anything else? What happens if a newly appointed authority claims transparency will enable bad actors?

Highly transparent systems with independent trust ranking make the most sense to me. Any solutions need to be opt-in, or, at the very least, opt-out.