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Bad Medicine
Tue, 10/04/2011 - 14:40 — Josh Bourne — PermalinkAt the end of September, Interpol coordinated a massive, multi-pronged effort to crack down on illegal Internet pharmacies that peddle fake prescription drugs. A recent article in The Register describes how police forces, customs agencies, ISPs, payment processors and delivery companies all contributed to the effort that arrested suspects in 81 countries.
Another major contributor to this takedown was Nominet, the United Kingdom-based domain name registry that operates the .UK ccTLD. Nominet suspended around 500 .UK domain names that were associated with these online pharmacies on the advice of law enforcement and regulatory agencies.
Nominet’s suspensions are different from the domain name seizures carried out by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division on various occasions over the past year. Namely, whereas ICE moved the seized domain names to its own name servers and displayed a notice of seizure on the sites, Nominet simply stops the suspended domain names from resolving to content, effectively shutting the websites down.
Nominet used the fact that all of the domains contained fake WHOIS information as justification for the suspension, which violates the registration agreement for registering a .UK domain. Additionally, Nominent is currently working to develop a policy under which law enforcement will have a more formalized process for requesting that domains believed to be hosting criminal content be taken down without needing a court order.
The proactive approach that Nominet is taking should serve as a model for other registries, both those that operate ccTLDs as well as those that run gTLDs.
Off to a Good Start...
Fri, 06/12/2009 - 11:42 — Phil Lodico — PermalinkICANN announced on Friday that it has teamed up with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago (NORC) to undertake a study on the accuracy of WHOIS contact data for domain names. The study will test the WHOIS data from a sample of domains from across different TLDs and different countries, and rank the accuracy of the name and contact information of each WHOIS registrant.
There is an overall lack of accountability in the domain name space and false WHOIS data is a part of the problem. When registrants use fake names or addresses, it becomes extremely difficult to track them down in pursuit of transferring the domains to those who have legitimate rights to them. This not only costs brand owners time and money, but also decreases the level of fair and open competition in the entire domain name system, which is one of the central principles that ICANN seeks to uphold.
This study is a great start to addressing the issue of false WHOIS data—unfortunately, given the current scope of the problem, this step has come much too late in the game. As I’ve said in previous posts, while it is always encouraging to see progress towards better policy, the pace at which steps are taken at ICANN is disheartening. Studying a problem is not the same as fixing it, and ICANN needs to find a solution to this problem sooner rather than later. I’m eager to see how ICANN plans to utilize the findings of this study and what actions it will take in the future to address the issue of false WHOIS.
