The ICANN community met last week in Kuala Lumpur to hold its yearly Annual General Meeting, its first in 3 years with face to face participation since ICANN 66 in Montréal, back in pre-pandemic 2019. A key takeaway from the meeting has been the efforts carried out by the GeoTLD Group to reach out to other representative of the community to show how the GeoTLDs governance model, based on their proximity to the communities they serve, dramatically reduces the potential exposure to registration abuse, as well as to malicious activities of any kind, making them some of the most secure areas on the Internet. DNS abuse is a growing concern for all agents of the domain name industry, and has been one of the main features in the ICANN discussion these last years. The GeoTLDs experience proves that a model where strong cooperation with Public Administrations and a focus on “prevention by design” drastically curbs the potential for abuse, and discourages the interest of bad actors.
On Sunday 18th the GeoTLD Group participated in a Capacity Building workshop organized by the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), the body where governments are represented in ICANN. The GeoTLDs presented the governments with data and details about what these Registry Operators are doing to prevent and react to malicious activity within their TLDs. Statistics show the level of abuse below 0,02% in these TLDs, and cases are identified immediately. GeoTLDs also explained how both contractual and technical remedies are adopted in these situation.
The approach championed by GeoTLDs received overall praise by assistants, and the government’s representatives showed great interest in understanding more about the cooperation between GeoTLDs and local Public Administrations and Law Enforcement Agencies. These educational and outreach efforts have been part of the mandate of the GeoTLD Group, and the Group is intensifying its participation in all DNS related forums to raise the profile of its members, and of the proximity model they represent. Since 2019 around 150 new representatives have joined the GAC, and this high turnover requires the community to lean in to help governments understand the context and finality of the discussions.
GeoTLDS and the GeoTLD Group
GeoTLDs are a very specific type of Top Level Domains focused on serving the needs of cultural, linguistic or regional communities. The dean of the lot is .cat, launched in 2007 to serve the needs of the catalan community on the Internet. This TLD inspired many communities to organise campaigns to obtain their own TLD, and we have today more than 60 GeoTLDs around the world, with examples such as .scot for the Scottish community, .quebec, .madrid, managed by the Government of Madrid, in Spain, and many others.
The GeoTLD Group is a non-for-profit association created with the mandate to represent the GeoTLDs’ interests. As such, it represents 35 GeoTLDs and 28 Registry Operators. Please see more information about the Group here: https://geotld.group
