DNS Abuse

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23 February 2026. The At-Large Community is gearing up for the ICANN85 Community Forumtaking place on 7-12 March 2026 in Mumbai, India, where one of several areas of priority for us is the evergreen topic of DNS Abuse Mitigation.

The At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) had first initiated a cross-community conversation on this topic via a plenary session at the ICANN83 Policy Forum in June 2025 in Prague, Czech Republic, and is now hosting afollow up plenary session at ICAN85 on 10 March 2026 to progress the DNS Abuse Mitigation agenda. As we head into ICANN85, the At-Large Community’s participation is expected to boost the end-user perspectives along several lines of inquiry – 

  • The At-Large Community had in June-July 2025, helped shape a list of Domain Name System (DNS) abuse mitigation gaps by providing input to GNSO Council’s DNS Abuse Small Team’s work, which sought to identify gaps that were preventative in nature, of the highest priority and relatively easy to overcome, which can be addressed by policy development.  
  • As a direct result, two GNSO Policy Development Processes have been initiated. These are the:
  1. GNSO DNS Abuse Mitigation PDP on Associated Domain Checks (DNS Abuse Mitigation PDP1) and 
  2. GNSO DNS Abuse Mitigation PDP on Safeguards for Application Programming Interface (API) access to new customers (DNS Abuse Mitigation PDP2). 
  • The work on PDP1 will commence during ICANN85 where the ALAC’s team of 2 members, 1 participant and 1 alternate will be on-site to meet their colleagues in the working group face-to-face for the first time on 7 March 2026. Four ICANN85 sessions have been allocated to the working group.
  • At the 10 March plenary session, we will gather with other community groups to:
    • Assess and discuss any preliminary shortcomings of the DNS Abuse Mitigation PDP1;
    • Establish a general understanding of how abuse caused by Domain Generation Algorithms might be tackled; and
    • Revisit the list of mitigation gaps to understand which remaining mitigation gaps should be prioritized for action 

Thus, ICANN85, being an APAC meeting, presents a golden opportunity for our region to get engaged in this topic.

Upcoming engagement opportunities

   At the ICANN85 Community Forum:

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