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Seven dead registrars on the out

Kevin Murphy, February 19, 2026, 12:38:35 (UTC), Domain Registrars

When a registrar stops paying its registry partners, they tend to be cut off relatively quickly. ICANN takes a bit longer.

That seems to be what’s happening to a collection of accredited registrars under the same ownership, which have been given just a few weeks to pay over a year’s worth of overdue ICANN fees or lose their ability to sell names.

ICANN Compliance is gunning for Haveaname, InstantNames, MisterNIC, NetEstate, Neudomain, OpenName, and TopSystem for non-payment of fees going back at least to September 2024.

Probably not coincidentally, that’s the same month that all seven registrars abruptly lost all of their domains under management — not much more than 1,000 per registrar — and apparently lost its .com accreditation.

According to the ICANN notice, Compliance spent the last few months of 2024 unsuccessfully attempting to get in touch with the registrars, before ignoring the case for the whole of 2025 and only returning to it this month.

The registrar web sites are all simple placeholders, with broken SSL certs, doing the bare minimum to stay in compliance with the ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement without actually attempting to sell any domains.

While almost all ICANN Compliance breach notices contain an allegation of unpaid fees, this is a rare instance where the allegations stop there; there’s no claim of any other breach.


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