IDG News Service — U.S. and U.K. law enforcement officials are trying to marshal support for changes that would make it more difficult for criminals to register domain names under false details.
Their aim is to get the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) — the overseer of the Internet’s addressing system — to impose stronger rules on registrars for generic top-level domains (gTLDs), healing such as “.com.”
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.K.’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) presented recommendations to ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) last fall in Seoul. Each country has a formal representative to the GAC.
Among those recommendations are that ICANN should require its vetted registrars to check that the information used to register domain names isn’t obviously fraudulent.
Also, they’d like to see a reformation of proxy services used to mask domain name ownership in the WHOIS database, while still respecting people’s right to privacy.