PIR Fighting Abuse – Join Us
By Brian Cimbolic, Vice President, General Counsel
At PIR we think it is important that we do our part to keep .ORG a trusted space and to improve the Domain Name System (DNS) as a whole. To that end, PIR is proud to have joined other like-minded registries and registrars to openly and collectively share joint practices that address abuses of the DNS, and in some instances, abusive website content.
These shared practices do not create any new DNS policy. Instead, we are working together to articulate what we think are responsible positions and procedures around anti-abuse efforts that we, as registries and registrars, stand behind and will continue to support. We believe these positions respect the principles of due process and free expression, while allowing us to serve as responsible stewards of our space.
The Framework to Address Abuse
First things first – there are many registries and registrars that are actively and aggressively combating DNS abuse. This isn’t a new thing, and we have had processes and procedures in place for quite some time. The participating registries and registrars are and will continue to be responsible stewards of the DNS. We thought there was a collective misunderstanding that we were not being responsible or aggressive with our approach against DNS abuse. We decided to fix that misperception.
Over the course of the last several months, some like-minded registries and registrars have been discussing, and ultimately created the “Framework to Address Abuse” recently published on CircleID. Again, this is not a policy making document – that is the role of the ICANN multi-stakeholder process. Instead, this is an articulation of what “doing the right thing” looks like. We want to help inform the spirited discussions going on right now around abuse and share what we have learned from our collective experiences.
In the Framework, we:
- Put down on paper our current, similar, and responsible actions to combat abuse;
- note our shared definition of “DNS Abuse”;
- describe what “taking action” looks like;
- note the role of trusted notifiers;
- define Website Content Abuse and describe when a registry or registrar should take action it; and
- note what we see is ICANN’s role in all of these discussions.
You can find the full document here. Please take time to see what we at PIR, along with our friends at other participating registries and registrars, are doing to be responsible stewards of our registrations. Please stay tuned for more information about how PIR specifically thinks about and approaches abuse.
For other registries and registrars that were not part of this effort, we hope you join us. Together we can protect our largest public resource – today, tomorrow, and for generations to come.