Pushes Verisign and PIR to help cut Opioid sales — U.S. Gov

Government wants to cut online opioid sales at the registry level.

Remember when the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) amended its contract with Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) for running .com and its statement mentioned content?

Amendment 35 confirms that Verisign will operate the .com registry in a content neutral manner with a commitment to participate in ICANN processes. To that end, NTIA looks forward to working with Verisign and other ICANN stakeholders in the coming year on trusted notifier programs to provide transparency and accountability in the .com top level domain.

It’s a contradictory paragraph. The first sentence states Verisign will operate .com content-neutral manner. The second one talks regarding Trusted Notifier programs in which domains are suspended on the basis of their content.

Well here’s the first look at that. The NTIA disclosed some activity around working with registries to take down sites offering opioids.

Neustar, which runs .US, is by now on board with a method for taking down such sites. Neustar operates .US on behalf of the U.S. government.

It’s this paragraph in the NTIA’s statement that is interesting:

FDA and NTIA are working with other key entities that have a role in the registration of domain names, counting Verisign, which oversees .com, and Public Interest Registry, which manages .org, on a framework focused on reducing the availability of opioids illegally offered for sale online. It also will help increase transparency and accountability in the domain name system and inform future conversations regarding “trusted notifier” programs expected to take place at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

That’s not exactly content-neutral. It’s hard to tell if this means they are just talking to the registries regarding how to work these programs through ICANN or if it is applying pressure on them.