All,

The attached draft defines a WHOIS Privacy and Proxy Abuse Study which methodically analyzes a representative sample of gTLD domains associated with a variety of illegal/harmful Internet activities. By measuring how often these alleged and confirmed “bad actors” use Privacy/Proxy registrations, compared to the overall frequency of Privacy/Proxy registrations, this study will attempt to prove or disprove the following hypothesis:

A significant percentage of the domain names used to conduct illegal or harmful Internet activities are registered via Privacy or Proxy services to obscure the perpetrator’s identity.

This draft is based on input proposals, refined to address several key challenges, including methods needed to study short-lived vs. long-lived activities, enumeration of useful input sources, and filtering of false positive reports. Suggestions are welcome; in particular, please consider the review questions posed on page 8. The next step will be to issue an RFP to determine study cost and feasibility by soliciting bids from researchers to conduct this study.

Please note that a separate study is still being drafted to measure delays associated with Privacy/Proxy Reveal.

Please provide all input by COB 14 May.  We will finalize the RFP based on the input we receive.

Thanks, Liz

Liz Gasster

Senior Policy Counselor

ICANN