Policy & Regulation

Governance Theater: Why the gTLD Expansion Program Is a Lose-Lose Proposition

ICANN's gTLD expansion program is structured to collect fees regardless of outcomes, leaving brand, portfolio and single-string applicants bearing financial risk while accountability mechanisms offer little meaningful remedy when the process fails.

Two Years After His Arrest, Pavel Durov Wants to Run His Own Registry

Telegram says it has applied for .gram, potentially giving a billion users DNS addresses while putting its governance, abuse controls, legal exposure and infrastructure under scrutiny as ICANN prepares to reveal applications.

auDA Moves to Tighten .com.au and .net.au Eligibility: What the Coming Changes Mean for Registrants

auDA has approved in principle tighter .com.au and .net.au eligibility rules that would limit registrations to domains matching a registrant's business name or Australian trademark, with implementation details and timing still pending.

Project Jake: A New Model for Domain Registration Data Disclosure

Project Jake proposes a voluntary, group-based framework for domain registration data disclosure, giving registrars and registries control over access while establishing standardized agreements, requester validation and sensitivity levels to balance privacy with legitimate data needs.

Building Digital Operations Across Borders: Regulation, Security & Internet Governance

Building a technology operation in India showed that regulation, governance, security, people and technology work best as one operating environment, with compliance, access controls and local autonomy designed in from the outset.

The Reporting Gap: What Happens Between a DNS Abuse Complaint and a Takedown

DNS abuse enforcement can stop abusive domains and drive systemic registrar reforms, but reporting barriers, inconsistent response times, and poorly documented complaints leave many phishing sites active before actionable cases ever reach enforcement.

Caribbean-Born Niel Harper Joins ICANN Board, Sets Out Priorities in Q&A

Barbados-born cybersecurity specialist Niel Harper joins ICANN's board in October, aiming to strengthen Latin American and Caribbean participation, improve DNS security and abuse mitigation, and expand developing-economy access to the next gTLD round.

ICANN Accountability Without gTLD Remedies Is Just Documentation

Past gTLD disputes show applicants can win ICANN accountability rulings without obtaining the contested string, raising a critical question for 2026 applicants about whether expanded review mechanisms can deliver meaningful remedies.

When a Link Becomes a Border: The Quiet Geopolitics of Internet Access

A LinkedIn short-link anomaly in Iran reveals how sanctions, corporate compliance and geolocation controls can translate geopolitical boundaries into infrastructure-level restrictions, creating an Internet that remains globally connected while becoming functionally unequal.

Thirty-Five Years Later, Moscow Comes Looking for the Soviet Union’s Domain

Russia is imposing state identity verification on .su, the Soviet Union's surviving domain, as researchers uncover criminal infrastructure across the namespace and ICANN pursues a retirement process that could eventually remove it from the global root.