ICANN Announcements

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Revised Report on DNS Abuse and New gTLD Program Safeguards Now Available

18 July 2016

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18 July 2016 - ICANN today announced that the "Revised Report on New gTLD Program Safeguards to Mitigate DNS Abuse" has been published.

Read the report [PDF, 101 KB].

The report, written by ICANN staff, explores methods for measuring the effectiveness of safeguards to mitigate Domain Name System (DNS) abuse that were implemented as part of the New gTLD Program. It explores which activities may constitute DNS abuse and provides a preliminary literature review examining rates of abuse in new gTLDs and the DNS as a whole.

The New gTLD Program Safeguards Against DNS Abuse report is intended to help inform the Competition, Consumer Trust and Consumer Choice (CCT) Review Team's analysis of how well program safeguards prevent DNS abuse.

The initial draft of the DNS Abuse Review report was published for comment on 15 March 2016. The revised version available today incorporates suggestions received during the public comment period on potential research methodologies and metrics to assess safeguard effectiveness. The CCT Review Team is considering this report and the feedback received as it continues to design and execute its review of New gTLD Program safeguards.

The report of public comments [PDF, 469 KB], which includes summary and analysis of the comments received regarding the draft report, was published and provided to the CCT Review Team on 17 June 2016.

New gTLD Program Reviews

ICANN's New gTLD Program has enabled hundreds of new top-level domains to enter into the Internet's root zone since the first delegations occurred in October 2013. Comprehensive reviews of the program are currently underway in a number of areas, including competition, consumer trust and choice, security and stability, rights protection and other areas. Along with commissioning third-party analyses, ICANN is capturing stakeholder experiences regarding the effects of the New gTLD Program.

About ICANN

ICANN's mission is to help ensure a stable, secure and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet, you have to type an address into your computer - a name or a number. That address has to be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN helps coordinate and support these unique identifiers across the world. ICANN was formed in 1998 as a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation and a community with participants from all over the world. ICANN and its community help keep the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It also promotes competition and develops policy for the top-level of the Internet's naming system and facilitates the use of other unique Internet identifiers. For more information please visit: www.icann.org.