DNS abuse and criminal infrastructure

More likely:

Some flavor of shit has hit the fan. I need to register some viable short and to the point domain names to get the word out faster than BigCo or the government and their army of lawyers can buy those domains.

Would we have stuff like DeFlock if there was an objection period?

What about if some advocacy firm was trying to create a website for people harmed by a drug. The drug company would just object to all their attempted registrations and bog them down.

> The community should instead consider whether contractual and operational arrangements adequately enable registries and registrars...

Those are things that are easy to say and hard to do. From the perspective of a good faith registrant, the enforcement is already too complex. There are hundreds of registries and thousands of registrars, all enforcing their own interpretation of the rules, so you end up with massive inconsistency.

No one wants their 10+ year old domain revoked for DNS abuse if they've been the victim of a security incident and it got misused, but dealing with that is hard and the economic structure of the industry isn't conducive to "intelligent" handling of complaints. Any solutions will scale the same as big tech with massive, automated systems that turn good faith participants into collateral damage.

A big problem for the domain industry is the way registries are shielded from liability and registrants. The registrars operate on thin margins and take on all the liability and customer support.

I don't think the registries will be given more responsibility. That's based on a personal bias though. I think the industry is set up to benefit the registries at the expense of registrars and registrants.

The registrars are the most likely party to be saddled with extra responsibility and I don't think that's a good solution because they have an economic incentive to look the other way. It's also a weakest link industry so, even if Porkbun, etc. are working overtime to keep bad actors off their platform, there's always someone willing to onboard a scammer for a few dollars.

In my opinion, there should be more talk about a centralized system funded by fees that ICANN collects. As a good faith registrant I want consistent, well defined rules with an appeals process, transparency etc.. I also don't care if I have to pay an extra dollar or two a year for my domains if it improves the industry overall.

Semi-related, does anyone know if there are any lists or decent sources for finding domains that have previously been suspended or put on block lists? That would be useful info for would-be registrants. No one wants to get surprised with a tainted domain.

Yeah, I wondered about that too. Any young people I know can barely tell you what a domain is. They're not directly visiting websites AFAIK and I don't think any of the platforms require a domain to participate.

> 9% experience online sexual extortion before the age of 18

That's an astronomical number and I'd assume it has to be an overall total. I hate those kinds of statistics because they're not telling you what you really need to know to make an informed decision. What's the percentage that involved a gTLD?

To me, this smells a bit like another effort at usurping control of the flow of information. Domains are an incredible tool for independence and the fact they've been co-opted by bad actors provides a great opportunity for a select few to seize control over what we're allowed to do with them :-(

They've made no effort to give normal participants an edge over the scammers and jump straight to censorship / control.

For example, consider that person on here with 'web.one' the other day. Why doesn't their expensive, premium domain include an increased level of trust and reputation?

If they want to do KYC, I think that's fine, but it should be an opt in system like the old EV certificates used to be. I don't need KYC and a bunch of controls to self-host things that no one else uses.

The problem with EV certificates is they became a money printing scam for the CAs. Plus, and this is an opinion, I think the platforms like Google and Facebook went out of their way to kill EV because damaging a trust indicator for domains benefits them when there are scams everywhere (as we're seeing now) and people need the platforms to "protect them" rather than having a fundamental understanding of how to evaluate risks on their own.