Registrar terminated after ignoring Whois transition
A registrar has lost its right to sell gTLD domains in part due to its failure to migrate from Whois to RDAP.
Spain-based Abansys & Hostytec has had its ICANN registrar contract terminated over a litany of alleged breaches dating back to 2023, and its meager collection of domains will now be given to another registrar.
ICANN said in its termination notice that the company had failed to implement the Registration Data Access Protocol, the successor to Whois that this week became the new industry standard for domain ownership lookups.
The registrar was also past due on its fees, hadn’t given ICANN evidence the was still in good standing, hadn’t had an employee attend compliance training and was not publishing masked contact addresses in Whois results, among other things.
While its accreditation dates back to the noughties, Abansys has never had more than 600 gTLD domains under management and it seems very unlikely that it was making enough money from those domains to cover the cost of compliance.
ICANN said the termination became effective January 26, but it still wants its past-due fees paid.
Separately, Compliance has also sent breach notices to four other registrars — US-based Zoo Hosting, UK-based Nerd Origins, and China-based Mixun and Mixun Network Technology — that cite RDAP failures as an area of non-compliance but appear to be primarily based on non-payment of fees.
All four registrars appear to have got accredited between 2019 and 2021 and stopped paying their fees not long afterwards. None of them has sold a single gTLD domain, ever, and two of their web sites suggest the companies are no longer around.
They’ve all got until February 12 to magically rectify their compliance problems or face execution.
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