Greg Aaron

Country:	USA
Email:	greg [at] afilias.info
LinkedIn:	[greg-aaron Greg Aaron]

Greg Aaron is President of Illumintel, which provides advising and security services to top-level-domain registry operators. He has launched and managed an extraordinary number of top-level domains, and is an internationally recognized authority on the use of domain names for e-crime. He is an expert on registry operations, launches and Sunrises, and domain name intellectual property issues.

Career at Afilias, 2001-2011

Greg was previously Director of Key Account Management and Domain Security at Afilias. He was part of the Afilias team that launched .info in 2001, and Greg managed .INFO between 2001 to 2005 and 2008 to 2011, handling Sunrises, creating product business requirements, and running business operations. In 2003, Greg led the development of a new, flexible registry platform for Afilias and migrated a number of ccTLDs onto it, including .ag, .gi, .hn, .la, .sc, and .vc. Greg advised the Government of India and registry operator NIXI regarding domain and related Internet policies from 2004 to 2008, and in 2004 led the re-launch of India's ccTLD, .in, on new systems with a set of liberalized policies. The .in domain grew from 6,500 domains to more than 450,000 in short order, and Greg also led the creation of a test-bed for deploying IDNs in Indic languages. In 2006, Greg directed the service rollout for the .mobi TLD on behalf of Afilias' customer mTLD, and managed .mobi services into 2008 After a smooth rollout, .mobi became the largest and most prominent domain from the last round of new TLDs. In 2008, Greg directed the highly successful introduction of .me, the ccTLD for Montenegro, in a partership between Afilias, GoDaddy, and doMEn. In 2011, Greg helped ICM Registry create the business requirements and launch plan for the .xxx registry.

Security and Anti-abuse

Greg created and oversaw Afilias' highly successful security programs, designed to address abuses such as phishing, spam, malware, child pornography, and fast-flux. He wrote the industry-leading .info Anti-Abuse Policy, which has been adapted to other TLDs, including .org. In 2010, Greg accepted an OTA Excellence in Online Trust Award for the program. In 2009, Afilias began providing anti-abuse service for Public Interest Registry and its TLD, .org.

Greg continues to represent Afilias on the Steering Committee of the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG). He is the co-author of the ongoing Global Phishing Survey series, which is the major source of phishing metrics and analysis. He has also participated in the Message Anti-Abuse Working Group as a representative of Afilias, and given a keynote address at its 15 meeting; he spoke on "Fighting Abuses in the Domain Name World".

Security and ICANN

Greg was chair of ICANN's Registration Abuse Policy Working Group. He was a founding member of the Registry Internet Safety Group, and served as its secretary. He was also an active member of ICANN's Fast-Flux Working Group.

Registry Stakeholder Group and New TLD Program

Greg has written a number of official public comments on behalf of the gTLD Registry Stakeholder Group (RySG). He was one of the core RySG members who helped shape the new TLD application and registry contract, in dialog with the ICANN staff and the ICANN community. Greg analyzed and helped shape Draft Applicant Guidebook versions 4 through 7, notably the application questions about security, and the registry contract provisions regarding service levels, rights protection mechanisms, and registry operations.

Other

Previously, he worked at Internet companies such as Travelocity and CitySearch, and in 1997 became one of the first bloggers to cover Silicon Valley.

He lives in Philadelphia, and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a Benjamin Franklin Scholar.

He was a member of the W3C's Internationalization Core Working Group and sat on the steering committee of the W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group.