Rightside has published a blog post to promote the work it’s doing to make the internet a safer place. It is, says Rightside, the right thing to do and ensures a better reputation for the domain name industry as a whole.

Recently their efforts were awarded with recognition by the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies (ASOP) and the Internet UK’s Watch Foundation (IWF).

ASOP presented its first Internet Pharmacy Safety E-Commerce Leadership Award to Rightside and domain registrar Realtime Register at ICANN58 in Copenhagen in March. As illegal online pharmacies proliferate across the internet, Rightside’s policies and practices have helped to shut down sites and prevent domain names from being used to distribute illegal, fake and dangerous drugs. This has led to a “near zero count of illegal internet pharmacies” using Rightside’s services, despite having hundreds of thousands of domains under management.

Rightside’s VP for Business and Legal Affairs, Statton Hammock, accepted the award at the GNSO Joint Meeting for the Registries and Registrars Stakeholder Group at ICANN58. “Rightside is pleased to be recognized for its ongoing efforts to shut down illegal pharmacies on both its registrar and registry platforms. The access to, and distribution of, unsafe medications to consumers without a license is a serious global public health risk and Rightside is glad to participate with other companies to address this problem.”

With hundreds of millions of domain names in the wild, the unfortunate fact is that when even a small percentage of them are used to distribute illegal imagery of child abuse, it is still far too many. While 80% of the domains identified as containing child abuse content were found in just five TLDs (.COM, .NET, .SE, .IO, and .CC), the problem is growing across the internet, including in new gTLDs. To do their part, Rightside participates in IWF’s Domain Alerts programme, to expedite the process of removing the offending domain at the registry level.

Alan Woods, Rightside’s Registry Compliance Manager has worked closely with IWF to ensure the registry can respond to Domain Alerts quickly and efficiently. “We believe that the IWF partnership provides an important protection, not only for all of Rightside’s registrants, and the general internet user, but [also for] the well-being of Rightside’s own Abuse Team in processing such reports,” he says. “[A]s one of the first new gTLD registries to partner with the IWF, [Rightside] sees the benefit of membership in establishing gTLD best practices to protect all web users worldwide from malicious actors.”