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New gTLDs – Competition, Consumer Trust and Consumer Choice Review Team: ICANN59 Update and Next Steps

14 July 2017
By Drew Bagley, Jordyn Buchanan, Laureen Kapin, and Jonathan Zuck

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The Competition, Consumer Trust and Consumer Choice Review Team (CCTRT) held two days of face-to-face meetings during ICANN59 in Johannesburg. The team met with a subset of the ICANN Board and a number of ICANN stakeholder groups to deliver updates on the Review Team's current progress and reaction to public comments received on their draft report.

What were the Three Major Achievements of this Meeting?

The Review Team:

  1. Analyzed the results of the Domain Name System (DNS) Abuse Intermediate Report following a presentation by the report's authors, which will be incorporated into a dedicated new section of the CCT-RT report, as appropriate.
  2. Agreed to issue any new sections of the report for public comment.
  3. Developed and reached consensus on a methodology to update the draft report.

Key Findings of the DNS Abuse Study Intermediate Report Presented to the CCT-RT at ICANN59

  • Abuse counts—or absolute number of abused domains—show relatively constant levels of technical abuse in legacy gTLDs and an upward trend of abuse in new gTLDs. This includes malware hosting, botnet command and control, high volume spam, and phishing.
  • With some exceptions and spikes, overall abuse rates in new gTLDs, which are based on an “abused domains per 10,000" ratio, tend to be lower than in legacy gTLDs. Abuse rate trends in new and legacy gTLDs appear to be converging to similar levels by the end of 2016, which suggests that cybercriminals may be migrating to new gTLDs.
  • Spam rates in new gTLDs surpassed spam rates in legacy gTLDs in mid-2015 and continue to rise. Spam rates in legacy gTLDs have remained relatively stable.
  • Privacy and proxy service-associated domains do not appear to correlate with abnormally high levels of abuse.
  • Based on registrar location, the United States and China tend to be associated with the highest absolute amounts of abuse. This is due in part to the fact that more registrars are headquartered in those countries. When the rate of abuse is calculated, Gibraltar takes a disproportionately high place in the rankings.

The final version of the DNS Abuse Study is scheduled to be delivered in early August 2017.

What are next steps for the Review Team?

The CCT-RT will:

  1. Update the draft report, as appropriate, in light of public comments received. Significant progress was made at ICANN59 to refine the draft recommendations and detail its rationales and success measures.
  2. Work on building new sections of the report that incorporate results of the DNS Abuse Study, as appropriate. The Review Team plans to issue these new sections of its report for public comment in August 2017.

The CCT-RT aims to send its final report to the ICANN Board of Directors prior to ICANN60.

Authors

Drew Bagley

CCTRT Vice Chair

Jordyn Buchanan

CCTRT Vice Chair

Laureen Kapin

CCTRT Vice Chair

Jonathan Zuck

CCTRT Chair