How a single Whois complaint got this registrar shitcanned

A British registrar has had its ICANN contract terminated after a lengthy, unprecedented fight instigated by a single complaint about the accuracy of a single domain’s Whois.
Astutium, based in London and with about 5,000 gTLD domains under management, finally lost its right to sell gTLD domains last week, after an angry battle with ICANN Compliance, the Ombudsman, and the board of directors.
While the company is small, it does not appear to be of the shady, fly-by-night type sometimes terminated by ICANN. Director Rob Golding has been an active face at ICANN for many years and Astutium has, with ICANN approval, taken over portfolios from other de-accredited registrars in the past.
Nevertheless, its Registrar Accreditation Agreement has been torn up, as a result of a complaint about the Whois for the domain name tomzink.com last December.
Golding told DI today that he considers the process that led to his de-accreditation broken and that he’s considering legal action.
The owner of tomzink.com and associated web site appears to be a Los Angeles-based music producer called Tom Zink. The web site seems legit and there’s no suggestion anywhere that Zink has done anything wrong, other than possibly filling out an incomplete Whois record.
The person who complained about the Whois accuracy, whose identity has been redacted from the public record and whose motives are still unclear, had claimed that the domain’s Whois record lacked a phone and fax number and that the registrant and admin contacts contained “made-up” names.
Historical Whois records archived by DomainTools show that in October last year the registrant name was “NA NA”.
The registrant organization was “Astutium Limited” and the registrant email was an @astutium.com address. The registrant mailing address was in Long Beach, California (the same as Zink). There were no phone/fax numbers in the record.
Golding told DI that some of these details were present when the domain was transferred in from another registrar. Others seem to have been added because the registrar was looking after the name on behalf of its client.
The admin and technical records both contained Astutium’s full contact information.
Following the December complaint, the record was cleaned up to remove all references to Astutium and replace them with Zink’s contact data. Judging by DomainTools’ records, this seems to have happened the same day as ICANN forwarded the complaint to Astutium, December 20.
So far, so normal. This kind of Whois cleanup happens many times across the industry every day.
But this is where relations between Astutium and ICANN began to break down, badly.
Even though the Whois record had been cleaned up already, Golding responded to Compliance, via the ICANN complaints ticketing system:

Please dont forward bigus/meaningless whois complaints which are clearly themselves totally inaccurate… No action is necessary or will be taken on bogus/incomplete/rubbish reports. [sic]

Golding agreed with me today that his tone was fairly belligerent from the outset, but noted that it was far from the first time he’d received a compliance complaint he considered bogus.
In the tomzink.com case, he took issue with the fact that the complainant had said that the admin/tech records contained no fax number. Not only was this not true (it was Astutium’s own fax number), but fax numbers are optional under ICANN’s Whois policy.
He today acknowledges that some parts of the complaint were not bogus, but notes that the Whois record had been quickly updated with the correct information.
But simply changing the Whois record is not sufficient for ICANN. It wants you to show evidence of how you resolved the problem in the form of copies of or evidence of communications with the registered name holder.
The Whois Accuracy Program Specification, which is part of the RAA, requires registrars to verify and validate changes to the registered name holder either automated by phone or email, or manually.
Golding told DI that in this case he had called the client to advise him to update his contact information, which he did, so the paper trail only comprises records of the client logging in and changing his contact information.
What he told ICANN in January was:

If ICANN compliance are unable to do the simple job they have been tasked with (to correctly vet and format the queries before sending them on, as they have repeatedly agreed they will do *on record* at meetings) then Registrars have zero obligations to even look at them. Any ‘lack of compliance’ is firmly at your end and not ours in this respect.
However in this specific case we chose to look, contacted the registrant, and had them update/correct/check the records, as can easily be checked by doing a whois

ICANN then explained that “NA NA” and the lack of a phone number were legitimate reasons that the complaint was not wholly bogus, and again asked Golding to provide evidence of Astutium’s correspondence with Zink.
After ignoring a further round or two of communication via the ticketing system, Golding responded: “No, we don’t provide details of private communications to 3rd parties”.
He reiterated this point a couple more times throughout February, eventually saying that nothing in WAPS requires Astutium to “demonstrate compliance” by providing such communications to ICANN, and threatening to escalate the grievance to the Ombudsman.
(That may be strictly true, but the RAA elsewhere does require registrars to keep records and allow ICANN to inspect them on demand.)
It was around the same time that Compliance started trying to get in touch with Golding via phone. While it was able to get through to the Astutium office landline, Compliance evidently had the wrong mobile phone number for Golding himself.
Golding told DI the number ICANN was trying to use (according to ICANN it’s the one listed in RADAR, the official little black book for registrars) had two digits transposed compared to his actual number, but he did not know why that was. Several other members of ICANN staff have his correct number and call him regularly, he said.
By February 27, Compliance had had enough, and issued Astutium with its first public breach notice (pdf)
Allowing a compliance proceeding to get to this stage is always bad news for a registrar — when ICANN hits the public breach notice phase, staff go out and actively search for other areas of potential non-compliance.
Golding reckons Compliance staff are financially incentivized, or “get paid by the bullet point”, at this stage, but I have no evidence that is the case.
Whatever the reason, Compliance in February added on claims:

• that Astutium was failing to output Whois records in the tightly specified format called for by the RAA (Golding blames typos and missed memos for this and says the errors have been corrected),
• that Astutium’s registration agreement failed to include renewal and post-renewal fees (Golding said every single page of the Astution web site, including the registration agreement page, carries a link to its price list. While he admitted the text of the agreement does not include these prices, he claimed the same could be said of some of the biggest registrars),
• that the registration agreement does not specify how expiration notices are delivered (according to Golding, the web site explains that it’s delivered via email)
• that the address published on the Astutium web site does not match the one provided via the Registrar Information Specification, another way ICANN internally tracks contact info for its registrars (Golding said that his company’s address is published on every single page of its site)

A final bullet point asked the company to implement corrective measures to ensure it “will respond to ICANN compliance matters timely, completely and in line with ICANN’s Expected Standards of Behavior”.
The reference to the Expected Standards of Behavior — ICANN’s code of politeness for the community — is a curious one, not typically seen in breach notices. Unless I’m reading too much into it, it suggests that somebody at ICANN wasn’t happy with Golding’s confrontational, sometimes arguably condescending, attitude.
Golding claims that some of ICANN’s allegations in this breach notice are “provably false”.
He told us he still hasn’t ruled out legal action for defamation against ICANN or its staff as a result of the publication of the notice.
“I’ll be in California, serving the paperwork myself,” he said.
Astutium did not respond to the breach notice, according to ICANN documents, and it was escalated to full-blown termination March 21.
On March 30, the registrar filed a Request for Reconsideration (pdf) with ICANN. That’s one of the “unprecedented” things I referred to at the top of this article — I don’t believe a registrar termination has been challenged through the RfR process before.
The second unprecedented thing was that the RfR was referred to Ombudsman Herb Waye, under ICANN’s relatively new, post-transition, October 2016 bylaws.
Waye’s evaluation of the RfR (pdf), concluded that Astutium was treated fairly. He noted multiple times that the company had apparently made no effort to come into compliance between the breach notice and the termination notice.
Golding was not impressed with the Ombudsman’s report.
“The Ombudsman is totally useless,” he said.
“The entire system of the Ombudsman is designed to make sure nobody has to look into anything,” he said. “He’s not allowed to talk to experts, he’s not actually allowed to talk to the person who made the complaint [Astutium], his only job is to ask ICANN if they did the right thing… That’s their accountability process.”
The Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee, which handles reconsideration requests, in June found against Astutium, based partly on the Ombudsman’s evaluation.
BAMC then gave Golding a chance to respond to its decision, before it was sent to the ICANN board, something I believe may be another first.
He did, with a distinctly more conciliatory tone, writing in an email (pdf):

Ultimately my aim has always been to have the ‘final decision’ questioned as completely disproportionate to the issue raised… and the process that led to the decisions looked into so that improvements can be made, and should there still be unresolved issues, opportunity to work in a collaborative method to solve them, without the need to involve courts, lawyers, further complaints/challenge processes and so on.

And then the ICANN board voted to terminate the company, in line with BAMC’s recommendation.
That vote happened almost a month ago, but Astutium did not lose its IANA number until a week ago.
According to Golding, the company is still managing almost all of its gTLD domains as usual.
One registry, CentralNic, turned it off almost immediately, so Astutium customers are not currently able to manage domains in TLDs such as .host, he said. The other registries still recognize it, he said. (CentralNic says only new registrations and transfers are affected, existing registrants can manage their domains.)
After a registrar termination, ICANN usually transfers the affected domains to another accredited registrar, but this has not happened yet in Astutium’s case.
Golding said that he has a deal with fellow UK registrar Netistrar to have the domains moved to its care, on the understanding that they can be transferred back should Astutium become re-accredited.
He added that he’s looking into acquiring three other registrar accreditations, which he may merge.
So, what is to be learned from all this?
It seems to me that we may be looking at a case of a nose being cut off to spite a face, somebody talking themselves into a termination. This is a compliance issue that probably could have been resolved fairly quickly and quietly many months ago.
Another takeaway might be that, if the simple act of making a phone call to a registrar presents difficulties, ICANN’s Compliance procedures may need a bit of work.
A third takeaway might be that ICANN Compliance is very capable of disrupting registrars’ businesses if they fail to meet the letter of the law, so doing what you’re told is probably the safest way to go.
Or, as Golding put it today: “The lesson to be learned is: if you don’t want them fucking with your business, bend over, grab your ankles, and get ready.”

ICANN closes GoDaddy Whois probe

ICANN has closed its investigation into GoDaddy’s Whois practices with no action taken.
Senior VP of compliance Jamie Hedlund yesterday wrote to David Redl, head of the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration, to provide an update on the probe, news of which first emerged in April.
The NTIA and members of the intellectual property community had complained that GoDaddy was throttling Whois access over port 43 and that it was masking certain fields in the output.
That was when GoDaddy and the rest of the ICANN-regulated industry was working under the old rules, before the new temporary Whois policy had been introduced to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation.
Hedlund told Redl in a letter (pdf):

Based on our review and testing (including outside of ICANN’s network), GoDaddy is not currently masking WHOIS data or otherwise limiting access to its WHOIS services. Consequently, the complaints related to GoDaddy’s masking of certain WHOIS fields, rate limiting, and whitelisting of IP addresses have been addressed and closed.

GoDaddy had said earlier this year that it was throttling access over port 43 in an attempt to reduce the availability of Whois data to the spammers that have been increasingly plaguing its customers with offers of web site development and search engine optimization services.

$44 billion company is latest deadbeat gTLD registry

Indian car-making giant Tata Motors has become the latest new gTLD registry to fail to pay its ICANN fees.
According to a breach notice (pdf), $44 billion-a-year Tata hasn’t paid its $6,250 quarterly registry fee since at least November last year (though probably much earlier).
Listed on the New York Stock Exchange and elsewhere and part of the Indian conglomerate Tata Group, the company runs .tatamotors as a dot-brand gTLD.
The breach notice, dated 10 days ago, also says that the company is in breach of its contract for failing to publish an abuse contact on its nic.tatamotors web site, something it seems to have corrected.
.tatamotors had half a dozen domains under management at the last count and seems to have at least experimented with using the TLD for private purposes.
Tata becomes the second dot-brand registry to get a slap for non-payment this year.
Back in April, the bank Kuwait Finance House, with revenues of $700 million a year, was also told it was late paying its fees.

Three reasons ICANN could swing the GDPR ban hammer on day one

While ICANN reckons it will act “reasonably” when it comes to enforcing compliance with its incoming GDPR emergency policy, there are some things it simply will not tolerate.
The policy expected to be approved tomorrow and immediately incorporated by reference into registry and registrar contracts, is a little light on expected implementation timetables, so this week ICANN has been pressured for clarity.
Will Compliance start firing off breach notices on May 26, the day after GDPR comes into effect, if the industry has not immediately implemented every aspect of the new policy?
Attendees at the Global Domains Division Summit in Vancouver managed to get some answers out of general counsel John Jeffrey at a session yesterday.
First off, if you’re a registrar planning to stop collecting registrants’ personal information for Whois, ICANN will not be happy, and you could be looking at a Compliance ticket.
Jeffrey said:

We don’t want any of the contracted parties to stop collecting the data. ICANN is confident that you can continue to collect the data. We will stand in front of you on it, if we can. Do not stop collecting the data. We believe we have a very strong, important point. We hear from the governments that were involved in passing this legislation that it’s important it continues to be collected.

Second, you have to have a mechanism in place for people with “legitimate purposes” to access thick Whois records that contain all the juicy personal information.
Jeffrey said:

We also believe it’s important there’s a need to continue to display information that will be behind that second tier. And we can demonstrate the need to do that as well. This is really important.

And if there was any doubt remaining, he added:

We will enforce on the temporary spec, if it’s approved, if you stop collecting data, or if you don’t provide any mechanism to allow access to it. It’s a very serious concern.

The problem right now is that the Temporary Policy (pdf), still in draft, doesn’t have a whole heck of lot of detail about who should be allowed such access and the mechanisms to enable it.
It says:

Personal Data included in Registration Data may be Processed on the basis of a legitimate interest not overridden by the fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals whose Personal Data is included in Registration Data

It goes on to list circumstances where access may be given and types of parties that may need access, but it seems to me to still give registries and registrars quite a lot of responsibility to decide how to balance privacy rights and the “legitimate” data requests.
Those two scenarios — not collecting data and not making it available to those who need it — seem to be the big two zero tolerance areas for ICANN.
Other issues, such as replacing the registrant’s email address in the thin Whois output, also appear to be a pressing concern.
Jeffrey said, noting that providing a way to contact registrants is important for myriad reasons, including UDRP:

Creating the anonymized emails or web forms is another really important aspect but we understand some won’t be able to have that in place immediately.

How long after GDPR Day ICANN starts swinging the ban hammer over the email issue seems to be something ICANN is still thinking about.
That said, Jeffrey said that the organization intends to act “as reasonably as possible”.

CentralNic now managing failing .fan and .fans

CentralNic appears to be acting as a caretaker for the failing new gTLDs .fan and .fans.
IANA records show that a company lawyer took over as administrative contact for the pair late last week.
Asiamix Digital, the original registry, is still listed as the sponsor for both, and its ICANN registry agreement does not appear to have been reassigned.
It does not appear to be an acquisition. I hear Asiamix is basically using CentralNic’s TLD management service, as it struggles to remain alive.
CentralNic already acts as the back-end registry for both TLDs.
ICANN hit Asiamix with a breach notice for tens of thousands of dollars of unpaid fees a month ago, terminating its affiliated registrar for the same reasons around the same time.
The registry had attempted to auction off the strings a couple of years ago, unsuccessfully.
While technically based in Hong Kong, ICANN has been sending Asiamix’s compliance notices to an address in Milan, Italy.
All of Asiamix’s official web sites still appear to be non-functional. I bought the .net address listed in its IANA records to make a silly point a month ago and the equivalent .com has since expired too.
.fans has about 1,400 names in its zone file right now, while .fan never actually launched.

$55 billion bank not paying its $6,250 ICANN fees

Kuwait Finance House has become the latest new gTLD registry to get slapped with an ICANN breach notice for not paying its quarterly fees.
The company is a 40-year-old, Sharia-compliant Kuwaiti bank managing assets of $55.52 billion, according to Wikipedia. It has annual revenue in excess of $700 million.
But apparently it has not paid its fixed ICANN dues — $6,250 per quarter — for at least six months, according to ICANN’s breach letter (pdf).
KFH runs .kfh and the Arabic internationalized domain name equivalent .بيتك (.xn--ngbe9e0a) as closed, dot-brand domains.
Neither appears to have any live sites, but both appear to be in their launch ramp-up phase.
ICANN has been nagging the company to pay overdue fees since November, without success, according to its letter.
They’re the third and fourth new gTLD registries to get deadbeat breach notices this month, after .qpon and .fan and .fans.

ICANN cancels registrar audit as GDPR headaches loom

ICANN has decided to call off a scheduled audit of its registrar base, to enable registrars to focus on sorting out compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation.
The biannual audit, carried out by ICANN Compliance, was due to start in May. As you likely know by now, May 25 is GDPR Day, when the EU’s privacy law comes into full effect.
In a letter (pdf) to registrars, senior VP of compliance Jamie Hedlund said: “The April 2018 registrar audit round is on hold.”
He added: “We are reviewing the schedule, resources and risks associated with holding a single, larger audit round in autumn of 2018, as well as considering alternative approaches.”
His letter came in response to a plea (pdf) from Registrar Stakeholder Group chair Graeme Bunton, who said an audit that clashed with GDPR deadline would be an “enormous undertaking” for affected registrars.
The audits, which have been running for a few years, randomly select a subset of registries and registrars to spot-check compliance with their Registrar Accreditation Agreements and Registry Agreements.
The program looks at 20-odd areas of compliance, one of which is Whois provision.

Another failing new gTLD stopped paying its dues

Another new gTLD registry has been slapped with an ICANN breach notice after failing to pay its fees.
California-based dotCOOL, which runs .qpon, seems to be at least six months late in making its $6,250 quarterly payment to ICANN, according to the notice (pdf).
It’s perhaps not surprising. The TLD has been live since mid-2014 and yet has failed to top more than about 650 simultaneous domains under management, at least 100 of which were registry-owned.
Right now, its zone file contains about 470 domains.
It typically sells new domains in the single digits each month, with retail prices in the $15 to $20 range.
With that volume and the inferred registry fee, a full year’s revenue probably wouldn’t cover one quarter of ICANN fees.
The string “qpon” is a pun on “coupon”. The idea was that companies would use the TLD to push discount coupons on their customers.
But they didn’t.
The number of live sites indexed by Google is in the single figures and none of them are using .qpon for its intended purpose.
ICANN’s breach notice also demands the company start publishing a DNSSEC Practice Statement on its registry web site, but that seems like the least of its worries.
As a novel, non-dictionary string, I worry that .qpon may struggle to find a buyer.
Last week, .fan and .fans, both operated by Asiamix Digital, got similar breach notices from ICANN.

I just bought a new gTLD registry’s domain for $10

Are .fan and .fans the latest new gTLDs to go out of business? It certainly looks that way.
ICANN has hit the registry with a breach notice for unpaid dues and stripped it of its registrar accreditation.
In addition, its web sites no longer appear functional and I’ve just bought its official IANA-listed domain name for under $10.
Asiamix Digital is the Hong Kong-based company behind both TLDs, doing business as dotFans.
It launched .fans in September 2015, with retail pricing up around the $100 mark, but never actually got around to launching the singular variant, which it acquired (defensively?) from Rightside (now Donuts) earlier that year.
.fans had fewer than 1,400 domains in its zone file yesterday, down from a peak of around 1,500, while .fan had none.
dotFans in-house accredited registrar, Fan Domains, didn’t seem to actually sell any domains and it got terminated by ICANN (pdf) at the end of March for failing to provide basic registrar services.
And now it seems the registry itself has been labeled as a deadbeat by ICANN Compliance, which has filed a breach notice (pdf) alleging non-payment of registry fees.
While breach notices against TLD registries are not uncommon these days, I think this is the first one I’ve seen alleging non-payment and nothing else.
The notice claims that the registry’s legal contact’s email address is non-functional.
In addition, the domains nic.fans, nic.fan and dotfans.com all currently resolve to dead placeholder pages.
Meanwhile, dotfans.net, the company’s official domain name as listed in the IANA database now belongs to me, kinda.
It expired March 12, after which it was promptly placed into a GoDaddy expired domains auction. Where I just bought it for £6.98 ($9.92).

To be clear, I do not currently control the domain. It’s still in post-expiration limbo and GoDaddy support tells me the original owner still has eight days left to reclaim it.
After that point, maybe I’ll start getting the registry’s hate mail from ICANN. Or perhaps not; it seems to have been using the .com equivalent for its formal communications.
Should .fan and .fans get acquired by another registry soon — which certainly seems possible — rest assured I’ll let the domain go for a modest sum.

ICANN confirms GoDaddy Whois probe

ICANN is looking into claims that GoDaddy is in breach of its registrar accreditation contract.
The organization last week told IP lawyer Brian Winterfeldt that his complaint about the market-leading registrar throttling and censoring Whois queries over port 43 is being looked at by its compliance department.
The brief note (pdf) says that Compliance is “in receipt of the correspondence and will address it under its process”.
Winterfeldt is annoyed that GoDaddy has starting removing contact information from its port 43 Whois responses, in what the company says is an anti-spam measure.
It’s also started throttling port 43 queries, causing no end of problems at companies such as DomainTools.
Winterfeldt wrote last month “nothing in their contract permits GoDaddy to mask data elements, and evidence of illegality must be obtained before GoDaddy is permitted to throttle or deny port 43 Whois access to any particular IP address”.
It’s worth saying that ICANN is not giving any formal credibility to the complaint merely by looking into it.
But while it’s usual for ICANN to publish its responses to correspondence it has received and published, it’s rather less common for it to disclose the existence of a compliance investigation before it has progressed to a formal breach notice.
It could all turn out to be moot anyway, given the damage GDPR is likely to do to Whois across the industry in a matter of weeks.