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ICANN threatens to shut down registrar flipper

Kevin Murphy, July 27, 2010, Domain Registrars

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.

Registrar linked to .xxx loses ICANN accreditation

Kevin Murphy, June 29, 2010, Domain Registrars

A Technology Company Inc, a registrar previously linked to the .xxx top-level domain application, has lost its ICANN accreditation for non-payment of fees.
The company, which is also known as NameSystem.com or ATECH, was founded by Jason Hendeles, who is also the founder of ICM Registry, the company behind .xxx.
ICANN has informed ATECH (pdf) that its accreditation will expire and not be renewed on July 12 because it has failed to pay $5,639 in ICANN fees.
ATECH was one of the second wave of competitive registrars to go live, applying for its ICANN accreditation all the way back in 1999. It currently has just a few thousand domains under management.
Hendeles, currently ICM’s vice president of strategic business development, was behind ICM’s original .xxx bid, filed in ICANN’s 2000 round of new TLD applications.
ICM was subsequently taken over by British businessman Stuart Lawley, its current chief executive.
I’m told ATECH was sold to Alok Prakash of Oregon a few years ago.
UPDATE 2010-07-14: ATECH has evidently coughed up, and has regained its accreditation.

AOL loses ICANN accreditation

Kevin Murphy, May 10, 2010, Domain Registrars

AOL, one of the first five companies to become an ICANN-accredited registrar, appears to have let its accreditation expire.
The former internet giant is no longer listed on ICANN’s Internic registrar page, and DotAndCo.net’s data shows it lost its .com, .net and .org accreditations on April 27.
It’s hardly surprising. AOL’s profits are falling and it has been reorganizing itself ever since Time Warner returned it to life as an independent company last year.
It’s noteworthy because AOL was one of the first five registrars to challenge Network Solutions’ monopoly, when ICANN introduced competition to the domain name market in 1999.
In April 1999, the company participated in ICANN’s limited registrar “test-bed” experiment, alongside CORE, France Telecom, Melbourne IT and Register.com.
But domain names were never a big deal at the company.
AOL peaked at about 150,000 domains a few years ago and tailed off to a little more than a dozen at the end of 2009. Apparently, the company has decided to let its accreditation simply expire.