Three registrars rapped for not paying ICANN fees

ICANN has sent compliance notices to three registrars for allegedly not paying their dues.
Dotted Ventures, Basic Fusion and A. Telecom S.A owe a total of roughly $25,000 in unpaid ICANN fees, according to the notices.
Basic Fusion and A Telecom also didn’t notify ICANN about changes of address, according to the notices.
All three have until May 14 to pay up or risk losing their registrar accreditation.
None of them are of notable size in the gTLD space, with fewer than 1,000 domains under management between them.

ICANN terminates three registrars

ICANN has pulled the plug on three accredited domain name registrars, saying they all failed to comply with an audit.
Lime Labs, R Lee Chambers Company (DomainsToBeSeen.com) and Central Registrar (Domainmonger.com) have been given 30 days notice that their accreditations are being yanked and that their domains will be transferred to other registrars.
About 12,000 domains will be affected, the vast majority of which are managed by Lime Labs.
The three registrars were among 10 that ICANN pounced on last month when they failed to respond to its Contractual Compliance Audit Program.
This program is a three-year initiative to make sure registrars and registries are complying with their contractual requirements. A third of registrars were randomly selected to take part late last year.
According to ICANN’s termination notices, all three registrars ignored last month’s warnings and did not submit the data required for the audit.
DomainsToBeSeen and Domainmonger both have just a few hundred gTLD domain names under management each. Lime Labs is much larger, with over 11,000.
The terminations will come into affect March 13.

Ten registrars spanked for ignoring ICANN audit

ICANN has sent breach notices to 10 domain name registrars for failing to respond to its ongoing contract compliance audit.
The 10 registrars with breach notices are: Crosscert, Mat Bao, DomainsToBeSeen.com, USA Webhost, Internet NAYANA Inc, Cheapies.com, Domainmonger.com, Lime Labs, Namevault.com, and Power Brand Center.
According to ICANN, these registrars failed to provide the requested documentation as required by their Registrar Accreditation Agreement.
The Contractual Compliance Audit Program is a proactive three-year effort to check that all registries and registrars are abiding by the terms of their agreements.
ICANN selected 317 registrars at random for the first year of the program. As of January 4, 22 had not responded to these notices.
Only registrars signed up to the 2009 version of the RAA are contractually obliged to respond.
Verisign, which was one of six gTLD registries selected to participate this year, has controversially refused to let ICANN audit .net, saying it is not obliged to do so.
While the .net contract does have some audit requirements, we understand they’re not as wide-ranging as ICANN’s audit envisages.
The 10 registrars have been given until February 1 to provide ICANN with the necessary information or risk losing their accreditations.

In major snub, Verisign refuses to let ICANN audit .net

Verisign has delivered a significant blow to ICANN’s authority by refusing to take part in its contractual compliance audit program.
The snub runs a risk of scuppering ICANN’s plans to make compliance a cornerstone of its new management’s strategy.
In a letter to ICANN’s compliance department this week, Verisign senior vice president Pat Kane said that the company has no obligation to submit to an audit of .net under its ICANN contract.
Kane wrote:

Verisign has no contractual obligations under its .net Registry Agreement with ICANN to comply with the proposed audit. Absent such express contractual obligations, Verisign will not submit itself to an audit by or at the direction of ICANN of its books and records.

The company is basically refusing to take part in ICANN’s Contractual Compliance Audit Program, a proactive three-year plan to make sure all gTLD registries and accredited registrars are sticking to their contracts.
For registries, the plan calls for ICANN to look at things like compliance with Whois, zone file access, data escrow, monthly reporting, and other policies outlined in the registry agreements.
Verisign isn’t necessarily admitting that it thinks it would not pass the .net audit, but it is sending a strong signal that it believes ICANN’s authority over it has limits.
In the program’s FAQ, ICANN admits that it does not have explicit audit rights over all contracted parties, stating:

What’s the basis for including all contracted parties, when the ‘Right to Audit’ clause isn’t present in 2001 RAA and Registry Agreements?
One of ICANN’s responsibilities is to conduct audits of its agreements in order to ensure that all contracted parties are in compliance with those agreements.

If Verisign is refusing to participate, other registries may decide they don’t want to cooperate either. That wouldn’t look good for ICANN, which has made compliance a key strategic priority.
When Fadi Chehade started as CEO last September, one of his first moves was to promote compliance boss Maguy Serad to vice president, reporting directly to him.
He told DI that he would be “bringing a lot more weight and a lot more independent management from my office to the compliance function”.
At his inaugural address to the community in Prague last June, he spoke of how he planned to bring IBM-style contract management prowess to ICANN.
Compliance is also a frequently raised concern of the Governmental Advisory Committee (though generally geared toward rogue registrars rather than registries).

Vietnamese registrar on the ICANN naughty step

ICANN has issued a broad breach notice against Vietnamese domain name registrar Mat Bao.
The company hasn’t escrowed its registrant data as required since February, according to ICANN, and it owes over $4,500 in accreditation fees.
It also hasn’t given ICANN a URL for its registrar web site, nor is it providing Whois service, according to the breach notice.
The registrar has fewer than 1,000 gTLD domain names under management, according to the latest registry reports.
ICANN has given it until January 17 to resolve its problems or risk losing its accreditation.

Delinquent top 20 registrar not delinquent after all

China’s largest domain name registrar isn’t shirking its ICANN fees, despite previous allegations to the contrary.
Xin Net, which has over 1.6 million gTLD domains under management, received a breach notice from ICANN last month which stated that the company was $2,000 in arrears with its payments.
The company was given until August 22 to correct the problem or risk losing its accreditation.
But in a subsequent compliance notice ICANN admitted that “due to an error the registrar’s account reflected a delinquent balance”.
The admission was buried deep in the notice and not immediately obvious to anyone browsing ICANN’s compliance pages.
The original notice also alleged a breach of the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy with respect to the domain names rongzhu.net, qsns.net and zuixincn.com, which was not an error.
ICANN posts breach notices to its web site fairly regularly — 84 of them since mid-2008 — and more often than not they allege failure to pay fees in addition to other problems.

Tiny Russian registrar gets canned

ICANN is to terminate a Russian registrar’s accreditation.
Name For Name Inc, which was given a breach notice last month, is being shut down for basically failing to act as a registrar.
Verisign had already cut off its .com/.net registrar contract and the company was not managing names, providing Whois, or doing any of the other things registrars are supposed to.
Under normal circumstances, a termination sees a mass transfer of all the domains under management to a nominated registrar, but in Name For Name’s case I can’t see that happening.
The company only had five gTLD domain names under management, according to the latest count.
Its accreditation will be terminated September 6.
ICANN also this week issued a breach notice to Visesh Infotecnics (Signdomains.com), apparently as the result of a badly handled domain name hijacking.

Five registrars on the ICANN naughty step

ICANN has sent breach notices to five domain name registrars, including two owned by Epik and DomainTools, for failing to cooperate with a Whois accuracy audit.
InTrust Domains, Planet Online, Server Plan, Infocom Network and DomainAllies.com did not respond to ICANN’s 2011 Whois Data Reminder Policy audit, according to ICANN.
The WDRP is the longstanding policy that requires all ICANN-accredited registrars to remind their customers to keep their Whois records up to date once a year.
The annual WDRP audit asks registrars to state how many reminders they sent out and how many Whois records were updated as a result, among other things.
The non-compliant registrars, with the exception of Server Plan, are also evidently past due paying their ICANN accreditation fees, according to the breach notices.
All five registrars have been given 15 days to rectify the problems or risk losing their accreditations.
Given that the audit is, I believe, a simple web-based form, I don’t think anyone is going to go out of business as a result of these breaches.
It’s interesting to dig a little bit into who owns these registrars.
DomainAllies.com belongs to DomainTools parent Thought Convergence.
InTrust, which has come in for criticism for shady marketing practices under its previous management, was acquired by Epik last July.
Planet Online, meanwhile, is one of those odd registrars that hides its own contact information behind a Whois privacy service (though its web site does carry a physical address).

Domain hijack leads to registrar shutdown threat

ICANN has threatened to terminate Chinese domain name registrar eName Technology after the domain 1111.com was allegedly hijacked.
According to ICANN’s notice of breach (pdf), eName has refused to hand over data documenting the transfer of 1111.com as required by the Registrar Accreditation Agreement.
ICANN claims that when it tried to get eName’s help investigating a hijacking complaint, the company did not return its calls or emails.
The registrar now has 15 days to provide the transfer records as called for by the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy.
According to historical Whois records, 1111.com was transferred to eName between February 12 and 16 this year. After a complaint, ICANN started chasing eName for the data on February 28.
The domain appears to have been owned by at least four different parties and three different registrars – Network Solutions, then Joker, then eName – since the start of 2012.
It’s the second time that ICANN has sent a breach notice to a registrar over an alleged mishandling of a domain name hijacking, and the first time it’s actually named the domain in question.
In February, the organization threatened Turkish registrar Alantron with the suspension of its contract over the botched handling of pricewire.com.

Rogue registrar suspended over “stolen” domain

ICANN has told Turkish domain name registrar Alantron that its accreditation will be suspended for a month due to its shoddy record-keeping.
The suspension, which will become effective March 8, follows an investigation into allegations of double-selling.
ICANN issued the suspension last Thursday after trying unsuccessfully for almost three months to get its hands on Alantron’s registration records.
The company now has until March 28 to sort out its compliance problems or face losing its accreditation entirely.
I understand the investigation was prompted by complaints filed by an American named Roger Rainwater over the potentially valuable domain name pricewire.com.
Pricewire.com spent a couple of years under Whois privacy but was grabbed last August by Turkish registrant Altan Tanriverdi, according to historical Whois records.
Rainwater, who says he had been monitoring it for three or four years, subsequently paid Tanriverdi an undisclosed sum for the domain, signing up for an Alantron account so it could be pushed.
Rainwater showed up in the Whois for pricewire.com on September 7 last year. But he says he was unable to change his name servers and 48 hours later the name disappeared from his account.
He says he was told by Alantron that it had put the domain in Tanriverdi’s account “by mistake” and that it was sold to SnapNames as part of a batch of dropping domains.
According to emails sent to Rainwater, seen by DI, Alantron said that pricewire.com was “registered via a partner company called Directi for a company called Snapnames”.
SnapNames had already auctioned the name – apparently there were more than 40 bidders – and the name has since been transferred to one Sammy Katz of Philadelphia.
However, given that Whois reliability is at question here, it’s not entirely clear who owns it. It’s currently parked at InternetTraffic.com.
Tanriverdi, who appears to be equally aggrieved, has published an extensive history of the dispute, along with screenshots, here (in Turkish).
In short: Alantron stands accused of double-selling pricewire.com.
ICANN’s compliance team has been unable to get its hands on the underlying transaction data despite repeated attempts because Alantron apparently doesn’t have it.
Its suspension notice alleges that Alantron was running two registration systems in parallel and that they weren’t talking to each other, resulting in the same name being sold to two parties.
Read ICANN’s suspension notice in PDF format here.