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A public comment period opens today for 20 days on an Initial Report on Fast Flux Hosting.

In May 2008, the GNSO Council initiated a Policy Development Process (PDP) and called for the creation of a working group on fast flux. The working group was asked to consider the following questions:

• Who benefits from fast flux, and who is harmed?
• Who would benefit from cessation of the practice and who would be harmed?
• Are registry operators involved, or could they be, in fast flux hosting activities? If so, how?
• Are registrars involved in fast flux hosting activities? If so, how?
• How are registrants affected by fast flux hosting?
• How are Internet users affected by fast flux hosting?
• What technical (e.g. changes to the way in which DNS updates operate) and policy (e.g. changes to registry/registrar agreements or rules governing permissible registrant behavior) measures could be implemented by registries and registrars to mitigate the negative effects of fast flux?
• What would be the impact (positive or negative) of establishing limitations, guidelines, or restrictions on registrants, registrars and/or registries with respect to practices that enable or facilitate fast flux hosting?
• What would be the impact of these limitations, guidelines, or restrictions to product and service innovation?
• What are some of the best practices available with regard to protection from fast flux?

The Group was also tasked to obtain expert opinion, as appropriate, on which areas of fast flux are in scope and out of scope for GNSO policy making.

The Fast Flux Working Group started its deliberations in June 2008 and has now published an Initial Report. In this report, the Working Group has provided initial answers to the charter questions, has drawn interim conclusions and has provided a number of ideas for next steps for discussion and feedback during the public comment period. It should be noted that at this stage the Working Group has not reached consensus on any of the ideas for next steps outlined in the report. The objective of the Working Group will be to review the input received during the public comment period and determine which, if any, of the proposed next steps receive the support of the Working Group for inclusion in the final report.

As stated in the ICANN Bylaws, the Initial Report is posted for public comment for 20 days. The comments received will be analyzed for redrafting of the Initial Report into a Final Report to be considered by the GNSO Council for further action.

The Working Group would like to encourage everyone to review the complete Initial Report [PDF, 1,210K] before submitting comments.

Comments on the Initial Report should be sent to fast-flux-initial-report@icann.org.

Public comments received can be accessed at http://forum.icann.org/lists/fast-flux-initial-report/.

The deadline for submission of comments is 15 February 2009.

Related links:

Fast Flux Hosting Issues Report: http://gnso.icann.org/issues/fast-flux-hosting/gnso-issues-report-fast-flux-25mar08.pdf [PDF, 62K]