ENFORCEMENT

Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement
SECTION 2
ACTION NO. 2.8: Integrate awareness of IP
crime and its illicit proceeds into broader efforts
to combat money laundering and the financing
of transnational organized crime networks. IPEC,
in coordination with relevant members of the
U.S. Interagency Strategy Planning Committees
on IP Enforcement, will engage international
partners to examine opportunities to integrate
awareness of IP crime into broader efforts to
combat money laundering and financing of
criminal networks.
B. IN FUTHERANCE OF A HEALTHY DOMAIN
NAME SYSTEM.
1. Assessing the Enforcement Challenge of
Domain Name Hopping.
For purposes of this section, the Administration has
directed its focus to detailing some of the reported
tactics used by criminal actors in the online environment
and the corresponding enforcement challenges. In
observance of the established global multistakeholder
approaches used to address domain name issues and
the National Telecommunications and Information
Administration’s (NTIA) role as the convener of the U.S.
government’s DNS interagency working group which
establishes U.S. policy positions on domain name issues
broadly and with respect to the Internet Corporation
for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), including
the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) and
its working groups, the U.S. Interagency Strategic
Planning Committees on IP Enforcement reaffirms the
principle that the “U.S. Government remains dedicated
to working within the multistakeholder construct at
ICANN and all relevant venues to vigorously defend and
advance U.S. interests.” 34
It has been reported that entities engaged in
online counterfeit sales, the unlawful exploitation of
copyrighted materials, and other large-scale infringing
activity may engage in a combination of “domain
name hopping” and “venue shopping” for perceived
domain name safe havens. 35 These tactics have been
reported within both the gTLD and ccTLD domain
name environments.
Top Level Domains (TLDs) are those strings of
characters that follow the last ‘dot’ in a domain name
– for example “.gov” in www.whitehouse.gov. TLDs
are typically divided into two categories: generic Top
Level Domains (gTLDs) and country code Top-Level
Domains (ccTLDs). gTLDs are those TLDs of three or
more characters, the operators of which typically have
contractual agreements with ICANN. ccTLDs are those
TLDs representing two-letter abbreviations for countries
and territories, such as .us for the United States or
.io for the British Indian Ocean Territory, delegated
under policies developed by the Internet Engineering
Task Force’s Request For Comment (RFC) 1591. 36 The
relationship between any given ccTLD administrator
and its government will differ from case to case and
may depend on complex and sensitive arrangements
particular to the local political climate. Different ccTLD
policies will reflect different approaches with respect
to process for the suspension, transfer, or cancellation
of a domain name registration. Some ccTLDs use the
same dispute resolution mechanism as gTLDs do – the
Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy – while
others tailor their own variations of this policy.
While the TLD environment provides Internet users
with a diversity of choice, operators of websites engaged
in illicit IP-based activities exploit this openness. To evade
law enforcement, bad actors will register the same or
different domain name with different registrars. They
then attempt to evade law enforcement by moving from
one registrar to another, thus prolonging the so-called
“whack-a-mole” pursuit. The result of this behavior is to
drive up costs of time and resources spent on protecting
intellectual property rights. 37
By way of illustration (FIG. 37), an operator of a
large file-sharing site found guilty of facilitating criminal
peer-to-peer file sharing of movies, music and games
continued to circumnavigate the globe and exploit the
domain name environment by moving from ccTLD to
ccTLD to evade law enforcement.
In the “Notorious Markets” Out-of-Cycle Review, the
Office of the U.S. Trade Representative lists illustrative
markets facilitating counterfeiting and piracy. In the
lists from 2013-2015, a total of 26 of 54 named sites,
or almost half of named online sites, operate within
the ccTLD environment. 38 Based on the most recent
Notorious Markets lists available prior to issuance of
this plan, ccTLDs comprise roughly half of all named
“notorious” top-level domains. 39 Considering that
ccTLDs are outnumbered by gTLDs in the domain name
base by more than a 2-to-1 ratio, the frequency of bad
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