domains Lawmakers Press Verisign To Join Trusted Notifier Program

[Lox]

For most of the last decade, the strategy of Hollywood studios and content creators in combating piracy has been in securing the cooperation of Internet companies and related actors in the ecosystem.

Earlier this year, MPA Chairman Charles Rivkin signaled a new level of cooperation with Google, after years in which the search giant was pilloried for not doing enough to combat copyright infringement.

More recently, a focus has been on the largest domain name registry, Verisign, with lawmakers querying the company on why it has declined so far to join an initiative to identify and eventually disable egregious infringing websites. Such agreements are referred to as “trusted notifier” arrangements, in which a registry or registrar is provided with accurate information about illegal website content, eventually leading to the disabling of the sites.

.... The company (Verisign) responded to the lawmakers by saying that it has initiated discussions with industry executives “for the purpose of establishing partnerships with state and federal authorities.”

But Verisign CEO Jim Bidzos also wrote that the company was cautious about doing so, given an agreement with the Department of Commerce, dating back almost three decades, “requires us to operate in a content-neutral manner.”

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[carob]

As a footnote to that, here is an interesting piece about identifiable patterns in the registration of deceptive domains: https://circleid.com/posts/20220913-registration-patterns-of-deceptive-domains

A key requirement for a bad actor wanting to launch a brand attack is the registration of a carefully chosen domain name. The most convincing infringements frequently use a domain name that’s deceptively similar to that of the official site of the target brand. This allows a variety of attacks to be executed, including phishing attacks—where the domain is used to host a lookalike site or produce a deceptive sender address for emails—and other kinds of brand infringement where users are misdirected to fake sites via mistyped URLs or search engine manipulation.

 

[tonyk2000]

"Verisign" + "Trust" is somewhat oxymoronic imo. But, in domaining context, any gTLD registry should indeed operate in content-neutral manner. It may be acceptable for a hosting company or for a registrar to refuse service to any particular customer, which would mean that such a customer will switch the provider. OK. But, should a customer of something dot com be rejected on registry level based on content or nature of business... if some lawmaker does not like or if the registry (a technical body) does not like it... this would be simply incorrect. Pandora's box. Something illegal in one country may still be perfectly fine in another country, there are a lot of examples.

 

[satsdifference.com]

verisign <-- network solutions (was only registrar pre-2000) <-- "INTERNIC" gov.

 

[AEProgram]

3 years ago I would say great idea. Now, I worry that the more that is expected of VeriSign the more it will be abused. If they are told to go ahead and pull the plug on domains, even though in the start it will be based on accurate good reasons, soon enough they will be pulling sites for political reasons.