Last week, COREhub attended the annual Registrar Days organized by VeriSign, this time held in Madrid, Spain. The 2 day agenda was packed with presentations covering a wide range of topics including the global economic outlook and the state of the domain industry, domain name trends, a briefing on ICANN75, and VeriSign product updates.
Two guest speakers were invited to the meeting as well: a Forrester analyst who presented current domain market research; and Thomas Rickert, from the ECO Association, who briefed on the upcoming EU Regulatory updates affecting registrars.
Additional dynamics to the discussions were brought by the panels on the roles and responsibilities across the internet ecosystem and DNS abuse and DNS security threats, an important topic of discussion in and around the ICANN community over the years. In addition, Registrars shared their experiences and the challenges they encounter: the need for common guidelines for law enforcement agencies (agencies often make very broad and unclear requests, e.g. “all logs”, as well as being reluctant to share information), for registrars, especially those with resellers (more resellers increase the response time when most damage is incurred in the first 48 hours), and also for registries, for example, to have a clearer definition of “bulk registrations” (e.g. 5 registrations at the same time may be considered bulk, but 30 registrations over 24 hours are not) and their own abuse detection procedures.
VeriSign, from their unique position in the internet infrastructure, stressed their commitment to fight abuse via proper tools (monitoring, blocking and redirecting abusive domain names, avoiding disposable domain name registrations, maintaining cooperative and responsive partnerships, ensuring adherence to contractual obligations, working with the ICANN community to develop best practices to combat security threats) as well as via third-party “trusted notifiers” that are identifying and reporting illegal and abusive activity online at the appropriate level in the DNS ecosystem.
What is the main takeaway? There was common agreement that all the DNS industry, and the registrars in particular, should be proactive in fighting DNS abuse and using security solutions even though it costs us time and money. If we don’t do enough and fail, the EU Commission will fix it on a regulatory level which will be much more expensive for us retroactively.
The attendees were also introduced to the local culture by a city walking tour, tasted local tapas as well as fine cuisine in a renowned restaurant.
