There is a clear shift in how ICANN accreditation is being used today. It is no longer just about selling domain names to retail customers; it is increasingly being treated as infrastructure for drop catching.

When ICANN brought the global domain industry together in Mumbai for ICANN85, one topic clearly dominated the agenda: DNS abuse mitigation. With nineteen dedicated sessions spread across six days, the level of attention this issue received signals both urgency and a certain level of confusion about where responsibility actually lies within the internet infrastructure stack.

One of the biggest assumptions in the domain name business is that once a registry launches a TLD, distribution will naturally happen through registrars. On paper, that sounds logical. Registrars are the retail layer of the domain industry.