Skip to main content

The Value of Assessing Collateral Damage Before Requesting a Domain Seizure

In our March 2012 Thought Paper on Domain Seizures and Takedowns, we offer guidance [PDF, 439 KB] to anyone who prepares an order that seeks to seize or take down domain names. By offering this guidance, we do not endorse such actions as a prescriptive measure, nor do we consider seizures or takedowns the appropriate remedy for every misuse or abuse. We only acknowledge that actions of these kinds have and will continue to be taken to combat criminal or abusive use of the DNS.

Several high-profile events during the past year demonstrate that domain seizures can cause unintended and severe consequences to legitimate web site operators, domain name registrants, and other investigators. In our thought paper, The Value of Assessing Collateral Damage Before Requesting a Domain Seizure, we offer guidance to in the form of questions investigators and preparers of orders should ask to ensure that seizures not only achieve the desired effect but do so without disrupting services or inflicting harm to legitimate web site operators or domain name registrants.

http://www.icann.org/en/about/staff/security/seizure-collateral-assess-24jan13-en

Comments

    Domain Name System
    Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."