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ICANN tries to limit rogue registrars

Kevin Murphy, June 3, 2011, 09:23:36 (UTC), Domain Registrars

As part of its growing efforts to clean up the domain name registrar market, ICANN has introduced background checks for companies applying for accreditation.
ICANN will check criminal and financial records, as well as doing credit checks, on companies that want to be able to sell domains in gTLDs.
As a result, the cost of applying to become a registrar is going up by $1,000, to $3,500, to cover the cost of accessing the relevant third-party databases.
The changes, made largely at the behest of law enforcement participants in ICANN, concerned that some registrars are not what you’d call responsible netizens, come into effect July 1.
The intellectual property lobby had called for the checks to include cybersquatting and UDRP judgements, but those suggestions were not taken on board.

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Comments (4)

  1. Louise says:
    June 3, 2011 at 6:13 pm

    What about Registrars known to shelter malware sites? Serving malware goes against the Registrar/user agreement . . . If Registrars shelter instead of censure malware-servers, would that not qualify as criminal?
    What if the Registrar itself serves malware?
    http://google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=bizcn.com
    (Smells like a Godaddy “affiliate.”) Think I’ll be needing to send another missive to Larry Strickling . . .

    Reply
  2. Garth Bruen says:
    June 4, 2011 at 2:32 pm

    Great post as always Kevin, but there’s ONE problem. ICANN was supposed to be doing this all along and told me years ago they did this procedure for each Registrar already.
    This validates our claim that they haven’t been vetting Registrars at all (except validating the fee check$!)
    @Louise, we’ve got documented cases of BizCn violating ICANN rules in order to keep malware sites ACTIVE. Where’s the breach notice?

    Reply
  3. J.Steven Livacich says:
    June 10, 2011 at 10:08 pm

    Garth Bruen seems to be right–as I would expect him to be (I have an account with”Knujon”)–it seemed to me that Internet Service Providers might also be held more responsible for bot-nets involving them and especially so when their clients are the exclusive or main victims of the bot-net. I might add that the Federal Government might have done much more of a, and a better job, administrating. It seems that the Office of Homeland Security left its administrative position with such responsibilities open for two years.
    People in the anti-war and pacifist communities have experienced getting viruses after viewing cyber-squater’s replica web site, while replica FBI web pages contain information as to how to avoid spam and malware as it “phishs” for personal information from Nigeria, etc.; and what was done about the “Trojan Horse” “XP 2008”–“XP 2009”, which the New York Times reported on and promised a report in 2008? Considering the magnitude of the problem we are ten years behind the presenting problems themselves–it is as if every city would liquidate their police forces and tell
    tell everyone to get a security guard. Steve

    Reply
  4. Karen says:
    July 28, 2013 at 2:35 am

    It’s been 2 years and yet BizCN continues to operate as usual. A registrant of BizCN has been using my email address to forge headers so that it appears I am sending the emails – which are a scam. The only domain name associated with the actual sender appears in a contact email address in the text message.
    I’ve repeatedly reported this abuse of my email address to BizCN and point out that the whois data for domain in the contact email doesn’t appear legit because the information for the physical address (street name and number, city, state, postal code and even country) and telephone number do not coincide. I also point out that there is no website associated with the domain, but now the registrant creates a new domain each week with different (falsified) contact information.
    The registrant initially used Regtime, but Regtime appears to have closed, at least temporarily, the fraudulent domains and has not allowed the owner to register any more domains. Okay, so the scammer has gotten a little more clever but I would think that registrars would be required to verify the whois contact information. Of course, BizCN is all too willing to close each domain when someone complains so that the registrant can then purchase a new domain or domains.
    How do I contact ICANN to report BizCN to them?

    Reply

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