Summary

  • The GAC’s 26 October Bali communiqué urges implementation of Associated Domain Checks before new gTLD strings are added to the DNS.
  • ICANN’s PDP1 has eight preliminary recommendations and five guidance items. Its working group was still considering public comments after the September consultation.

The next class of top-level domains is already moving through ICANN’s application machinery. At the Bali meeting, government advisers pointed at a different piece of machinery that is still on the bench: a rule that would make a registrar look beyond one abusive domain to other domains associated with the same customer or registrant. The Governmental Advisory Committee wants that rule operating before the new strings enter the Domain Name System.

The 26 October communiqué sets the desired deadline. ICANN’s DNS Abuse Mitigation Policy Development Process 1, or PDP1, published an initial report in August with eight preliminary recommendations and five implementation-guidance items. The proposed trigger is actionable evidence of DNS abuse at one domain; the registrar would then investigate associated domains. The consultation closed on 28 September. ICANN’s comment summary counts 42 submissions. Across responses to individual proposed outputs, it classified about 56% as support for the wording and another 29% as support for the aim with changes.

The working group had adopted no resulting changes when that summary appeared; it began weighing the comments at ICANN87. The implementation timetable is still missing.

The GAC had already used its own September submission to press for information sharing across registrars. Its October communiqué renews that point and adds the sharper clock. It also asks for reliable, reproducible measures of whether registries and registrars meet their abuse obligations. Those requests expose two different gaps: a registrar may see only its own slice of a campaign, and a policy can look decisive on paper while leaving no comparable public record of performance.

The 2026 domain programme has dates, but the important one here is still missing. ICANN set 17 November for String Confirmation Day, when the final applied-for names will be published. Comments and objections run into March 2027. ICANN says later evaluation milestones remain to be confirmed. Publishing a string on a list is not adding it to the DNS; the GAC’s requested finish line is the later delegation of new strings, for which that milestone announcement gives no date.

The collision is institutional as well as temporal. The GAC can demand sequencing. The GNSO working group must finish policy recommendations, and ICANN’s adoption and implementation steps then have to turn them into an operational obligation. The communiqué does not show those steps completed. The next useful public record is a timetable with separate dates for a final PDP1 report, decision, contractual implementation and first new-string delegation. Without those receipts, “before launch” is a fine phrase with no clock attached.

Original records: GAC Bali communiqué; ICANN PDP1 consultation and summary; GAC’s September submission; ICANN’s 2026-round milestones.