Public Interest Registry (PIR), Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) & eco’s topDNS Initiative held the seventh in a series of topDNS best practice webinars highlighting what the domain name industry is doing to fight DNS abuse.
In February 2024, Public Interest Registry, the US non-profit organisation that operates the .ORG top-level domain, and the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) announced a new partnership that will empower all domain name registries to disrupt sites dedicated to the commercial distribution and exploitation of online child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
The new programme includes a pioneering sponsorship agreement whereby PIR will sponsor other registries and registry service providers with free access to two key IWF services, Domain Alerts and the Top-Level Domain (TLD) Hopping List. TLD hopping is a practice whereby criminal websites are taken offline only to reappear, often with the same content and name, but under a different top-level domain. The new programme makes the TLD Hopping List – which targets the criminal sites that the IWF has identified as recognisable abuse “brands” – available to all registries free of charge for the first time. With more registries having access to the lists, there will be fewer places for criminals running abuse “brands” to try to register their sites.
In this webinar Brian Cimbolic, PIR’s Chief Legal and Policy Officer, and Will Few, Development Officer at IWF, explained the domain abuse mitigation services, the partnership, how the programme works, and how registries and registry service providers can participate for free to help stop child sexual abuse online.