LAUSR

The centralized zone data service (CZDS) was introduced by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to facilitate sharing and access to zone data of the new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs). CZDS aims to improve the security and transparency of the naming system of the Internet. In this paper, we investigate CZDS’s transparency by measurement and evaluation. By requesting access to zone data of all gTLDs listed in the CZDS portal, we analyze various aspects of CZDS, including access status, responsiveness and provided reasons for granting access or denial. Among other findings, we find that while a large percent of the gTLD admins respond within a reasonable time, more than 10% of them have a long request-to-decision waiting time, and sometimes requests go unanswered even after six months of a request. Furthermore, we find that denial cases were for unjustified reasons, where administrators who denied the requests have asked for information that was already provided in the request form. We discuss implications, and how to enforce better outcomes of CZDS using insight from our measurement and evaluation.