ICANN was a massive success in getting the word out about DNS Abuse and FIRST

By Peter Lowe, FIRST DNS Abuse Ambassador
Thursday, October 27th, 2022

In September, ICANN invited me to talk about DNS Abuse at the ICANN75 AGM in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It was a great success! My presentation ‘The Challenge of Defining DNS Abuse’ was well received, and many attending industry specialists asked good questions, especially about FIRST's work. I made many valuable connections, including people from ICANN, the DNS Abuse Institute, registries, registrars, CERTs, commercial companies, government organizations, and many more.

ICANN75 featured several valuable and interesting talks. DNS Abuse is a hot topic right now, and from day one of the event, it came up repeatedly, even highlighted by the ICANN president and CEO during the opening meeting. The term's meaning is vague to some and specific to others, so my talk, The Challenge of Defining DNS Abuse, was appropriate in many ways!

Almost from the start of the event, I was able to meet valuable people, some of whom helped to arrange future meetings with other important people linked to the work of DNS Abuse.

I made lots of new connections and had great conversations. I also met people from various departments at ICANN, registries, registrars, CERTs, commercial companies, government organizations, and more.

My presentation went very well - there was great interest in it. Tech Day was a great place to present - being a catch-all for anything technical that didn't fit into the other elements of ICANN. There were more follow-up questions in my Q&A part than we had time to go through.

Meeting people in person that I've interacted with online was an absolute highlight for me. Putting faces to names strengthens relationships in ways that are hard to define but very useful. I also had dinner with several people, which gave me a further chance to deepen some of those conversations.

There are a lot of things to follow up on now. For example, the DNS Abuse Institute has an excellent study that merits further thought - recreating their experiments and looking at their source data could be a whole topic. DNS Abuse is a potential way to bridge that gap. Many people were curious about FIRST's work in the DNS Abuse SIG. I found myself sharing with a lot of people what FIRST did and what its mission was. We have already had several applications to the DNS Abuse SIG, and I think more will be coming shortly.

It was highly advantageous for FIRST to have a presence at this conference and we should participate in other similar events.

For myself, the event was strenuous but also excellent. It will take me a while to ingest and absorb everything correctly, but there are already tangible benefits, and I hope to go to more events like this in the future.

Have to give a bit shout-out to Carlos Alvarez of ICANN, who was super helpful before and during. I have to say - he saved me, spent 40 minutes going through the entire schedule with me, explained many acronyms and the overall structure of ICANN elements, and introduced me to lots of people while I was there. He also had some excellent feedback for me in the SIG channel, which was good to hear.


Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is an internationally organized non-profit corporation responsible for coordinating the technical functioning of the Domain Name System and of the provision of the IANA services (iana.org). ICANN75 AGM occurred in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, September 17-22.