ICANN Corporation published a report on a possible new top-level domains influence on Internet unity and security. According to ICANN data domains .home and .corp are not obliged to delegating and all other new domains appearance is delayed for six to twelve months.
In an independent report prepared by Interisle Consulting Corporation it’s stated that new top-level domains can negatively influence users security. What’s meant here is the requests from home access devices to Internet and corporate networks. Large amount of these requests happens while using Google Chrome browser and other home Internet access devices. For example now there are more than half million requests to .home domain per day. At this “misprints” when a user forgets to use domain zone prefix are less than 1 percent of all such requests. Domain .corp which is often used in corporate culture is also in the requests amount risk zone.
In case if domains in high risk zone would be delegated, a number of negative scenarios is possible. Users can be victims of phishing attack or can have no access to enter a corporate site and corporate mail can send an e-mail with confidential info to a wrong server. Such domains delegating would mean that absolutely all private and corporate networks should be checked for compatibility.
As the result of the ICANN report all the new top-level domains requests have been divided into three groups. “High risk” group includes .home and .corp domains: ICANN doesn’t delegate these domains till the applicants show proof that the domains are of no risk any more.
“Low risk” group consists of 1128 domains (80% of all the new offered domains), in particular it includes all the IDN-domains. ICANN will go on with signing agreements with registries of such domains although six months must pass between the signing of the agreement and the moment when the first domain name can be registered in the new domain. It means that the registries of the new domains of this category can start using their domains no earlier than next year.
The last group is the domains which risk level could not be determined by ICANN (279 domains, 20% of all the domains). To determine whether to place these domains in the high or low risk category ICANN will provide an additional audit check which will take three to six months. Thus registration period in such domains will start no earlier than in 9 or 12 months, depending on when ICANN conducts audit checks.
