ICANN
Private whois records hide spammers and help bring down a registrar
I’ve talked in the past about how many spam filters, ISPs and blocklists treat domains that are registered behind privacy protection. I’ve written about how many commercial domains behind privacy protection are used for fraud. I’ve written about multiple legal cases where the courts ruled against companies using privacy protected domains in email. I’ve even gone so far as to claim hiding domains behind privacy protection is what spammers do.
Legitimate email marketers do not hide their domains behind privacy protection services.
Spammers absolutely do hide behind privacy protection services. And because of how privacy protection works, we really don’t know which domains are used by one spammer versus another spammer. ICANN gave us a little bit of insight into just how many domains a spammer registers when they terminated Dynamic Dolphin (pdf link). This is a situation that has been brewing for most of 2013. I wrote about the notice of contract breach back in October. This morning Brian Krebs wrote a blog post saying that ICANN had terminated the agreement with Dynamic Dolphin for failing to cure the breach as noticed back in October.
If you read through the timeline, ICANN has some interesting information about privacy protected domains at Dynamic Dolphin. Data about privacy protected domains was requested from the very beginning.
New top level domains
ICANN have signed agreements for four new top level domains, all internationalized domains from the 2o12 applications for new TLDs.
They are شبكة (“network” or maybe “web” in arabic), 游戏 (“game” in chinese), онлайн and сайт (“online” and “website” in russian).
It’ll take a while for the registries to ramp up their infrastructure, but you might start seeing domains registered in these TLDs as soon as Q1 of next year. Email in internationalized domains is still not really viable, but web pages with fully internationalized URLs certainly are, and they’re likely to get much more popular with these new TLDs.
Can your message composition and reputation monitoring infrastructure handle non-ascii URLs correctly? If not, you’ve got six months or so to start getting that in place.
XXX coming to a mailbox near you… eventually
ICANN voted to advance the .xxx TLD proposal today. As one might expect, this is a sponsored TLD intended for use porn and adult sites. This doesn’t mean that .xxx domains will be available immediately, there are still multiple steps in the process.
The next step is for ICANN to investigate the business model of ICM Registry, the sponsor of this TLD. If that passes, then .xxx domains will be coming to web browsers and mailboxes near you.
Update: For those of you who are shocked there is porn on the internet I only have to say (NSFW video + audio after the cut)