ICANN threatens to shut down registrar flipper
ICANN has said it will terminate one of its registrars for non-payment of fees, the thirteenth such threatening letter the organization has sent out this year.
The unfortunate recipient is #1 Host Brazil, which has just a couple hundred domains under its belt in the generic top-level domains.
I may be wrong, but based on some cursory research I’m inferring that the registrar is basically a shell accreditation, acquired in order to flip to a larger registrar.
There are 10 other “‘#1 Host” registrars, such as #1 Host Australia and #1 Host Canada, listed on ICANN’s list of accredited registrars, almost all of which were awarded in late 2005 to the same Texan.
They all use the same logos and, due to the hash sign, all appear at the top of alphabetical lists of ICANN-accredited registrars.
Apart from the Brazil and Israel variants, most of the other “#1” accreditations have been acquired by Moniker at various times over the last few years, according to Internic and Whois records.
#1 Host Brazil faces de-accreditation (pdf) on August 24 unless it pays almost $9,000 in ICANN fees and provides evidence of $500,000 in commercial liability insurance.
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