[At-Large] DomainIncite : Is this why WhatsApp hates some TLDs but not others?

[bzs at theworld.com]

To be perfectly, bluntly honest the underlying problem is that the
internet made several forms of mass communication free or nearly free
to end-users.

Even sending literally on the order of a billion spam messages per
day, as major spammers do, costs little once one has the
infrastructure set up and it doesn't require expensive infrastructure,
much of it relies more on deception.

So now we have to figure out how to deal with such behavior having
abandoned the usual limitation that it would cost too much (e.g., to
send out a billion messages on paper, or if messages were charged per
each.)

With little warning or thought we reduced that cost to roughly zero
for the senders.

There is cost. But it's been transferred to the receivers, both the
infrastructure providers who have to provide sufficient infrastructure
to handle their share of billions of mail messages per day and other
abuse, and to end-users who have to sift through mailboxes which may
be 90% or more spam/phishing/unwanted-advertising, etc.

There's an effect on society but that's outside of the scope of
this. But for example the billions of people on the net might be doing
something more useful with their time than sifting through spam.

It relies on deception because if a billion messages came from
spamco.com we'd just block spamco.com.

And this can be extended to many other behaviors such as scripts which
crawl looking for message board software which the script knows how to
fill with advertising tho that's not generally DNS-related in any way
but the economic principle is the same. Hint: If you were thinking of
setting up a site using the free WikiMedia software used for Wikipedia
you may be in for a lot of frustration.

N.B. Personally I tend to not have a problem with "pull technologies",
if someone wants to set up and run a site devoted to eating live
puppies I don't really care so long as it's not deceptive in nature
(e.g., made to look like a Red Cross site and soliciting donations.)

So we're thrust into a world with few options having eliminated the
most effective in the past -- it used to cost too much to be a huge,
global criminal, particularly anonymously.

We have the legal structure which isn't very effective when the
stock-in-trade is anonymity and often extrajurisdictional sources.

We have contracts with parties who might be able to mitigate the
problem but that amounts to cost-shifting to those parties which they
resent.

Where to go?

And, this is not a joke: Perhaps AI will find a big win in curating
the net better.

On September 17, 2023 at 15:09 at-large at atlarge-lists.icann.org (Karl Auerbach via At-Large) wrote:
 > 
 > On 9/17/23 2:51 PM, John McCormac wrote:
 > >> So rather than focusing on "DNS Abuse (phishing, spam and malware) 
 > >> and Content Abuse (intellectual property and trademark infringement 
 > >> etc)" we ought to focus on the harmful aspects - fraud, 
 > >> misrepresentation, violation of copyright or trademark - rather than 
 > >> on a gear tooth (DNS) in one kind of machinery though which these 
 > >> harmful acts are committed.
 > >
 > > That might put ICANN, the registries, and the registrars in the 
 > > position of being content regulators. I don't think that any of them 
 > > want that.
 > >
 > I think we may have what in legal circles we call "a distinction without 
 > a difference".
 > 
 > At the end of the day, whether we regulate an act via DNS or because of 
 > laws against fraud, the end result is regulation of content.
 > 
 > Indeed, until we have widespread systems of remotely operated robotics, 
 > pretty much anything we act on on the internet is based on content.
 > 
 > (The exceptions to that are things like response time metrics, which, to 
 > my mind, when they pertain to DNS are clearly within ICANN's remit.)
 > 
 >          --karl--
 > 
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-- 
        -Barry Shein

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