Extortion or Expansion? An Investigation into the Costs and Consequences of ICANN’s gTLD Experiments

Abstract

Since October 2013, the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has introduced over 1K new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) with the intention of enhancing innovation, competition, and consumer choice. While there have been several positive outcomes from this expansion, there have also been many unintended consequences. In this paper we focus on one such consequence: the gTLD expansion has provided new opportunities for malicious actors to leverage the trust placed by consumers in trusted brands by way of typosquatting. We describe gTLDtm (The gTLD typosquatting monitor) – an open source framework which conducts longitudinal Internet-scale measurements to identify when popular domains are victims of typosquatting, which parties are responsible for facilitating typosquatting, and the costs associated with preventing typosquatting. Our analysis of the generated data shows that ICANN’s expansion introduces several causes for concern. First, the sheer number of typosquatted domains has increased by several orders of magnitude since the introduction of the new gTLDs. Second, these domains are currently being incentivized and monetarily supported by the online advertiser and tracker ecosystem whose policies they clearly violate. Third, mass registrars are currently seeking to profit from the inability of brands to protect themselves from typosquatting (due to the prohibitively high cost of doing so). Taken as a whole, our work presents tools and analysis to help protect the public and brands from typosquatters.