White House To Meet With ICANN On Illegal Online Pharmacies
The White House has called a meeting for later this month with the group that manages the Internet's domain name system to discuss ways to crack down on illegal online pharmacies.
The meeting with officials from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will take place Sept. 29 with White House Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel and other White House and agency officials, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Management and Budget confirmed. An ICANN spokesman said he didn't know which ICANN official would be attending the White House meeting yet.
The White House also invited ICANN-accredited registrars, firms that sell domain name registrations to the public, and registries, the companies and groups that operate the databases of each domain name such as .org or .com, to attend the meeting.
ICANN has been criticized for not doing enough to crack down on registrars who provide domain name registrations to Web sites that sell fake or stolen drugs without a prescription.
The Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement issued by Espinel earlier this year calls for cracking down on illegal online pharmacies and directed an interagency committee on the counterfeiting of pharmaceutical drugs and medical products to study how best to tackle the problem.
LegitScript, an Internet pharmacy verification service, issued a report in May detailing which Internet registrars had sold registrations to illegal online pharmacies. LegitScript President John Horton has noted that ICANN's registrar accreditation agreement bars domain names from being used for illegal activities. Registrars must be accredited by ICANN before they can sell domain name registration services to the public.
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