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ICANN slaps first deadbeat dot-brand with breach notice

Kevin Murphy, June 7, 2016, Domain Registries

The world’s third-largest mobile phone company, worth some $14 billion a year, is the first new gTLD registry operator to refuse to pay ICANN fees.
That’s according to ICANN’s compliance department, which last night slapped Bharti Airtel with the new gTLD program’s first public contract breach notices.
The notices, which apply to .bharti and .airtel, claim that the Indian company has been ignoring demands to pay past due fees since February.
The ICANN quarterly fee for registries is $6,250. Given .airtel and .bharti were delegated 11 months ago, the company, which has assets of $33 billion, can’t owe any more than $37,500.
Bharti Airtel is, according to Wikipedia, the third largest mobile network operator in the world and the largest in India, with 325 million subscribers.
Yet ICANN also claims it has had terrible difficulty getting in touch with staff there, saying:

ICANN notes that Bharti Airtel exhibits a pattern of non-response to ICANN Contractual Compliance matters and, when responses are provided to ICANN, they are often untimely and incomplete.

The compliance notices show that ICANN has also communicated with Verisign, the registry back-end operator for both gTLDs, to try to get the matters resolved.
According to ICANN, the registry is also in breach of terms that require it to publish links to its Whois service, abuse contacts and DNSSEC practice statements on its web site.
The sites nic.airtel and nic.bharti don’t resolve (for me at least) with or without a www., but the Whois services at whois.nic.airtel and whois.nic.bharti appear to work.
These are the first two registries of any flavor emerging from the 2012 application round to receive public breach notices. Only one pre-2012 gTLD, .jobs, has the same honor.
ICANN has given Bharti Airtel 30 days from yesterday to come back into compliance or risk losing its Registry Agreements.
Given that both gTLDS are almost a year old and the nic. sites still don’t resolve, one wonders if the company will bother.