PIR: Making the Internet Safer All Year Round
By Jon Nevett, PIR President & CEO
As the world recognizes Safer Internet Day – an international day dedicated to promoting safety and well-being online – Public Interest Registry (PIR) is taking a moment to share the ways we actively work to create a safer Internet all year long.
At PIR, we see protecting the integrity of the Internet not just as a lofty goal, but a responsibility we’ve upheld for years. PIR has long been a leader in the anti-abuse space, particularly in the areas of DNS (Domain Name System) Abuse and responsible and thoughtful approaches for egregious Website Content Abuses like Child Sexual Abuse Materials (CSAM). We saw a gap in the industry for equal access to resources to combat DNS Abuse, and we addressed that need. In 2021, we founded The NetBeacon Institute to help the Internet community identify, report, and combat DNS Abuse through collaborative knowledge sharing.
As the steward of the .ORG Family of Domains – some of the most trusted spaces on the Internet – we devote considerable thought and resources to ensure that our top-level domains (TLDs) live up to the standards that we have set for ourselves and that our inspiring registrants deserve.
One of the ways we foster those standards is through enforcement of our Anti-Abuse Policy to address abuses, guided by our recently updated Anti-Abuse Principles. One of these core principles is that “We will do what is right, even when it is hard.” This means we cannot and will not do the bare minimum to mitigate abuses, and we will be forward-leaning and thoughtful in all cases. Our approach may prove challenging at times, but we always strive to do what is right when all factors are weighed.
In that spirit, we’re proud to share that we’ve recently joined the Shadowserver Alliance – a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the Internet more secure by exposing abusive domain name requests and ensuring bad actors cannot register abusive domain names.
Shadowserver operates a Domain Name System (DNS) sinkhole that purposefully receives DNS requests for abused domain names so they can prevent the domains from resolving. Shadowserver then tracks where the requests are coming from and helps notify the victims impacted by the domain names. By joining the Shadowserver Alliance, PIR will help provide additional financial support to help Shadowserver keep people safer online.
We’ve also continued to put our values into action by launching two new partnerships to prevent online sexual abuse in just the last year.
Just last month, we announced a new partnership with Nominent and SWGfL – a nonprofit that operates The Revenge Porn Helpline – to help remove non-consensually shared intimate images (NCII) from the Internet. Through this new partnership, PIR will work with the Revenge Porn Helpline to identify sites with a .ORG domain that are hosting NCII content adjudicated by a court to be non-consensual, and take action towards their removal. This action could be in the form of notifying the site to remove the content or suspending the site entirely, if it is dedicated to the distribution of NCII.
And back in February 2024, we launched a partnership with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to expand access to their tools that disrupt sites dedicated to the commercial distribution and exploitation of online CSAM. Through this first-of-its-kind partnership, we’ve expanded IWF protections to 21 registries, helping keep criminal content off an additional 53 TLDs with more than 43 million domains under management at no cost to participating registries. This partnership also follows the service we piloted in 2020 with Identity Digital and the IWF to combat TLD Hopping—a practice whereby criminal sites that are dedicated to the distribution of CSAM are taken offline, only to reappear with the same content and same name, but under a different top-level domain—as part of our ongoing work to combat CSAM.
These trailblazing partnerships and robust anti-abuse principles further our core nonprofit mission to serve as an exemplary Domain Name Registry and help ensure the Internet is used for the common good – not abuse. Today, as we look back proudly at these partnerships we’ve forged as part of our longstanding commitment to keep the Internet safe, we move forward continuing to hold our responsibility to do so as our north star. Together, we can create a better Internet for all.