To crack down on online opioid sales to begin — Pilot program

Registries for .com, .net, .org and .us may suspend domains under program.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration logo with the words "Trusted Notifier"

National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is active with domains again.

Over one year following announcing plans to crack down on websites selling illegal opioids, the NTIA and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) disclosed a pilot program to suspend domains.

The groups are working with Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) (.com, .net), Neustar (.us) and Public Interest Registry (.org) to suspend domains connected to websites that are illegally selling unapproved opioids.

During the 120-day pilot, the FDA will serve as a “trusted notifier” to let registries know regarding offending domains. The registries may then voluntarily lock the domain, delete the domain, or place the domain on hold.

There is not much teeth behind the pilot, and it will be interesting to see how many alerts the FDA sends and what the registries decide to do. It will also be interesting to see if the FDA only alerts registries following verifying that a site illegally sold the products to someone in the U.S.

Also on the wire