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Five gTLDs at risk as registry goes AWOL
The chance of five new gTLDs themed around the Middle East ever going live has substantially decreased after the registry seemed to disappear and got hit by a third ICANN breach notice.
The registry is Istanbul-based Asia Green IT System, which goes by AGIT or AgitSys, and the five gTLDs are .nowruz (Iranian New Year), .pars (refers to Persia/Iran), .shia (a branch of Islam), .tci (an outsourced dot-brand for the Telecommunication Company of Iran) and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd, means “comrade” in Persian).
According to ICANN, the company is failing to provide Whois, data escrow and has not filed its monthly transaction reports since February. It is also past due with its ICANN fees, according to the breach notice.
The turnaround for the breach notice was incredibly fast. ICANN appears to have noticed that the Whois failures met the “RDAP-RDDS emergency threshold” — which is 24 hours of downtime in a single week — on Friday, called the registry the same day, and issued the breach notice on Monday.
The technical breaches may or may not be related to the fact that the company appears to have disappeared from the internet. None of its NIC sites resolve for me today, and its agitsys.com company web site returns a 404.
These things were also true in 2019, when AGIT received its first breach notice, which was later resolved. It received a second notice a year ago, which it also later resolved.
Only .nowruz, the only one of the five to launch, appears to have any third-party registrations in its zone file, counting in the single figures and all apparently defensive. I could get one of them to resolve, so the DNS appears to be functional.
AGIT uses CoCCA as its back-end. CoCCA had data accuracy issues with transaction reports for its other gTLD client, Rusnames, last year, but these were quickly rectified.
ICANN has given AGIT until the end of the month to come back into compliance or risk having its contracts terminated.
For the avoidance of confusion, there haven’t been any technical failures of the back-end registry services provided by CoCCA. Earlier in the year CoCCA sent a breach notice and, after AGIT failed to remedy the breach, terminated the contract with AGIT.
RDAP, WHOIS, Reporting and Escrow deposits have been disabled by CoCCA incrementally.