.tel’s second-biggest registrar gets canned

A Chinese registrar that focused exclusively on selling .tel domain names has been shut down by ICANN.
Tong Ji Ming Lian (Beijing) Technology Corporation Ltd, which did business as Trename, had its registrar contract terminated last week.
ICANN claims the company had failed to pay its accreditation fees and failed to escrow its registration data.
The organization had been sending breach notices since June, but got no responses. Trename’s web site domain currently resolves to a web server error, for me at least.
Trename is a rare example of a single-TLD registrar, accredited only to sell .tel domains. It didn’t even sell .com.
It is Telnames’ second-largest registrar after Name.com, accounting for about 6,000 names at the last count. At its peak, it had about 55,000.
Its share seems to be primarily as a result of a deal the registry made with a Chinese e-commerce company way back in 2011.
I’m a bit fuzzy on the details of that deal, but it saw Trename add 50,000 .tel names pretty much all at once.
Back then, .tel still had its original business model of hosting all the domains it sold and publishing web sites containing the registrant’s contact information.
Since June 2017, .tel has been available as a general, anything-goes gTLD, after ICANN agreed to liberalize its contract.
That liberalization doesn’t seem to have done much to stave off .tel’s general decline in numbers, however. It currently stands at about 75,000 names, from an early 2011 peak of over 305,000.
ICANN told Trename that its contract will end September 19, and that it’s looking for another registrar to take over its domains.
With escrow apparently an issue, it may not be a smooth transition.

$44 billion company is latest deadbeat gTLD registry

Indian car-making giant Tata Motors has become the latest new gTLD registry to fail to pay its ICANN fees.
According to a breach notice (pdf), $44 billion-a-year Tata hasn’t paid its $6,250 quarterly registry fee since at least November last year (though probably much earlier).
Listed on the New York Stock Exchange and elsewhere and part of the Indian conglomerate Tata Group, the company runs .tatamotors as a dot-brand gTLD.
The breach notice, dated 10 days ago, also says that the company is in breach of its contract for failing to publish an abuse contact on its nic.tatamotors web site, something it seems to have corrected.
.tatamotors had half a dozen domains under management at the last count and seems to have at least experimented with using the TLD for private purposes.
Tata becomes the second dot-brand registry to get a slap for non-payment this year.
Back in April, the bank Kuwait Finance House, with revenues of $700 million a year, was also told it was late paying its fees.

CentralNic now managing failing .fan and .fans

CentralNic appears to be acting as a caretaker for the failing new gTLDs .fan and .fans.
IANA records show that a company lawyer took over as administrative contact for the pair late last week.
Asiamix Digital, the original registry, is still listed as the sponsor for both, and its ICANN registry agreement does not appear to have been reassigned.
It does not appear to be an acquisition. I hear Asiamix is basically using CentralNic’s TLD management service, as it struggles to remain alive.
CentralNic already acts as the back-end registry for both TLDs.
ICANN hit Asiamix with a breach notice for tens of thousands of dollars of unpaid fees a month ago, terminating its affiliated registrar for the same reasons around the same time.
The registry had attempted to auction off the strings a couple of years ago, unsuccessfully.
While technically based in Hong Kong, ICANN has been sending Asiamix’s compliance notices to an address in Milan, Italy.
All of Asiamix’s official web sites still appear to be non-functional. I bought the .net address listed in its IANA records to make a silly point a month ago and the equivalent .com has since expired too.
.fans has about 1,400 names in its zone file right now, while .fan never actually launched.

$55 billion bank not paying its $6,250 ICANN fees

Kuwait Finance House has become the latest new gTLD registry to get slapped with an ICANN breach notice for not paying its quarterly fees.
The company is a 40-year-old, Sharia-compliant Kuwaiti bank managing assets of $55.52 billion, according to Wikipedia. It has annual revenue in excess of $700 million.
But apparently it has not paid its fixed ICANN dues — $6,250 per quarter — for at least six months, according to ICANN’s breach letter (pdf).
KFH runs .kfh and the Arabic internationalized domain name equivalent .بيتك (.xn--ngbe9e0a) as closed, dot-brand domains.
Neither appears to have any live sites, but both appear to be in their launch ramp-up phase.
ICANN has been nagging the company to pay overdue fees since November, without success, according to its letter.
They’re the third and fourth new gTLD registries to get deadbeat breach notices this month, after .qpon and .fan and .fans.

I just bought a new gTLD registry’s domain for $10

Are .fan and .fans the latest new gTLDs to go out of business? It certainly looks that way.
ICANN has hit the registry with a breach notice for unpaid dues and stripped it of its registrar accreditation.
In addition, its web sites no longer appear functional and I’ve just bought its official IANA-listed domain name for under $10.
Asiamix Digital is the Hong Kong-based company behind both TLDs, doing business as dotFans.
It launched .fans in September 2015, with retail pricing up around the $100 mark, but never actually got around to launching the singular variant, which it acquired (defensively?) from Rightside (now Donuts) earlier that year.
.fans had fewer than 1,400 domains in its zone file yesterday, down from a peak of around 1,500, while .fan had none.
dotFans in-house accredited registrar, Fan Domains, didn’t seem to actually sell any domains and it got terminated by ICANN (pdf) at the end of March for failing to provide basic registrar services.
And now it seems the registry itself has been labeled as a deadbeat by ICANN Compliance, which has filed a breach notice (pdf) alleging non-payment of registry fees.
While breach notices against TLD registries are not uncommon these days, I think this is the first one I’ve seen alleging non-payment and nothing else.
The notice claims that the registry’s legal contact’s email address is non-functional.
In addition, the domains nic.fans, nic.fan and dotfans.com all currently resolve to dead placeholder pages.
Meanwhile, dotfans.net, the company’s official domain name as listed in the IANA database now belongs to me, kinda.
It expired March 12, after which it was promptly placed into a GoDaddy expired domains auction. Where I just bought it for £6.98 ($9.92).

To be clear, I do not currently control the domain. It’s still in post-expiration limbo and GoDaddy support tells me the original owner still has eight days left to reclaim it.
After that point, maybe I’ll start getting the registry’s hate mail from ICANN. Or perhaps not; it seems to have been using the .com equivalent for its formal communications.
Should .fan and .fans get acquired by another registry soon — which certainly seems possible — rest assured I’ll let the domain go for a modest sum.

.feedback threatens to shut off MarkMonitor

Top Level Spectrum, the controversial .feedback gTLD registry, has threatened to de-accredit MarkMonitor unless it apologizes for “breaching” its registrar contract.
The move is evidently retaliation for the MarkMonitor-coordinated complaint about .feedback’s launch policies, which last month led to TLS being found in breach of its own ICANN contract.
De-accreditation would mean MarkMonitor would not be able to sell .feedback domains any more, and its .feedback names would be transferred to another registrar.
In a letter to MarkMonitor (pdf) yesterday, TLS informs the registrar that it breached its Registry-Registrar Agreement by releasing said RRA to “the press” as part of the exhibits to its Public Interest Commitments Dispute Resolution Policy complaint.

The problem we take issue with is that your exhibit should have redacted the “Confidential RRA Agreement” prior to being handed over to ” the press ” and it should have been marked in an appropriate way so ICANN would not publicly disclose it. As we can tell no precautions were taken and as a party to the action we find that you violated the confidentiality of the agreement.

I understand “the press” in this case includes DI and others. We published the document last October. We were not asked to keep anything confidential.
The RRA section of the document is marked as “private and confidential” and contains terms forbidding the disclosure of such information, but the name of the registrar is redacted.
TLS believes the undisclosed registrar is actually Facebook, a MarkMonitor client and one of the several parties to the PICDRP complaint against .feedback.
While Facebook may not have actually signed the RRA, MarkMonitor certainly did and therefore should not have released the document, TLS says.
The letter concludes that the “breach… seems incurable” and says: “Please let us know what actions you will take to cure this breach with us or we will have no other option but to de-accredited your Registrars.”
Despite this, TLS CEO Jay Westerdal tells us that an apology will be enough to cure the alleged breach.
The threat is reminiscent of a move pulled by Vox Populi, the .sucks registry, last year. Vox deaccredited MarkMonitor rival Com Laude in June for allegedly leaking a confidential document to DI (I was never able to locate or identify the allegedly leaked document, and had not published any document marked as confidential).
TLS was found in breach of the Public Interest Commitments in its ICANN contract last month by a PICDRP panel. It was the first registry to suffer such a loss.
The PICDRP panel found that .feedback’s launch had not been conducted in a transparent way, but it stopped short of addressing MarkMonitor’s complaints about “fraudulent” behavior.

.feedback gTLD in breach of contract after big brand “fraud” claims

ICANN has slapped .feedback operator Top Level Spectrum with a contract breach notice after a huge complaint about alleged fraud filed by a gang of big brands.
The company becomes the third new gTLD to be hit by a breach notice, and the first to receive one as a result of losing a Public Interest Commitments Dispute Resolution Process case.
While TLS dodged the “fraud” charges on a technicality, the breach is arguably the most serious found by ICANN in a new gTLD registry to date.
The three-person PICDRP panel found TLS was in violation of the following commitment from its registry agreement:

Registry Operator will operate the TLD in a transparent manner consistent with general principles of openness and non-discrimination by establishing, publishing and adhering to clear registration policies.

But TLS dodged the more serious charges of “fraudulent” behavior, which it denied, largely on the technicality that its PICs only require it to bar its registrants from such behavior.
There’s nothing in the PICs preventing the registry from behaving fraudulently, so the PICDRP panel declined to rule on those allegations, saying only that they “may be actionable in another forum”.
The complainants, which filed their 1,800-page complaint in October, were MarkMonitor and a bunch of its clients, including Adobe, American Apparel, Best Buy, Facebook, Levi and Verizon.
They’d claimed among other things that 70% of .feedback domains were trademarked names actually registered by the registry, and that TLS had stuffed each site with reviews either paid for or scraped from services such as Yelp!.
They claimed that Free.Feedback, a free domains service hosted by an affiliated entity, had been set up to auto-populate Whois records with the names of brand owners (or whoever owned the matching .com domain) even when the registrant was not the brand owner.
This resulted in brand owners receiving “phishing” emails related to domains they’d never registered, the complainants stated.
TLS denied all all the allegations of fraud, but the PICDRP panel wound up not ruling on many of them anyway, stating:

the Panel finds that Respondent’s Registry Operator Agreement contains no covenant by the Respondent to not engage in fraudulent and deceptive practices.

The only violations it found related to the transparency of .feedback’s launch policies.
The panel found that TLS had not given 90 days notice of policy changes and had not made its unusual pricing model (which included an extra fee for domains that did not resolve to live sites) transparent.
The registry had a number of unusual launch programs, which I outlined in December 2015 but which were apparently not adequately communicated to registrars and registrants.
The panel also found that Free.Feedback had failed to verify the email addresses of registrants and had failed to make it easy for trademark owners to cancel domains registered in their names without their consent.
Finally, it also found that TLS had registered a bunch of trademark-match domain names to itself during the .feedback sunrise period:

self-allocating or reserving domains that correspond to the trademark owners’ marks during the Sunrise period constitutes a failure by the Respondent to adhere to Clause 6 of its Registration and Launch policies, versions 1 and 2. According to the policies, Sunrise period is exclusively reserved for trademark owners

TLS, in its defense, denied that it had self-allocated these names and told the panel it had “accidentally” released them into the zone file temporarily.
As a result of the PIC breaches found by the panel, ICANN Compliance has issued a breach notice (pdf) against the company.
To cure the breach, and avoid having its Registry Agreement taken away, TLD has to, by April 15:

Provide ICANN with corrective and preventative action(s), including implementation dates and milestones, to ensure that Top Level Spectrum will operate the TLD feedback in a transparent manner consistent with general principles of openness and nondiscrimination by establishing, publishing and adhering to clear registration policies;

That seems to me like it’s probably vague enough to go either way, but I’d be surprised if TLS doesn’t manage to comply.

ICANN slaps first deadbeat dot-brand with breach notice

The world’s third-largest mobile phone company, worth some $14 billion a year, is the first new gTLD registry operator to refuse to pay ICANN fees.
That’s according to ICANN’s compliance department, which last night slapped Bharti Airtel with the new gTLD program’s first public contract breach notices.
The notices, which apply to .bharti and .airtel, claim that the Indian company has been ignoring demands to pay past due fees since February.
The ICANN quarterly fee for registries is $6,250. Given .airtel and .bharti were delegated 11 months ago, the company, which has assets of $33 billion, can’t owe any more than $37,500.
Bharti Airtel is, according to Wikipedia, the third largest mobile network operator in the world and the largest in India, with 325 million subscribers.
Yet ICANN also claims it has had terrible difficulty getting in touch with staff there, saying:

ICANN notes that Bharti Airtel exhibits a pattern of non-response to ICANN Contractual Compliance matters and, when responses are provided to ICANN, they are often untimely and incomplete.

The compliance notices show that ICANN has also communicated with Verisign, the registry back-end operator for both gTLDs, to try to get the matters resolved.
According to ICANN, the registry is also in breach of terms that require it to publish links to its Whois service, abuse contacts and DNSSEC practice statements on its web site.
The sites nic.airtel and nic.bharti don’t resolve (for me at least) with or without a www., but the Whois services at whois.nic.airtel and whois.nic.bharti appear to work.
These are the first two registries of any flavor emerging from the 2012 application round to receive public breach notices. Only one pre-2012 gTLD, .jobs, has the same honor.
ICANN has given Bharti Airtel 30 days from yesterday to come back into compliance or risk losing its Registry Agreements.
Given that both gTLDS are almost a year old and the nic. sites still don’t resolve, one wonders if the company will bother.

Two legit registrars held to account for lack of abuse tracking

ICANN Compliance’s campaign against registrars that fail to respond to abuse reports continued last week, with two registrars hit with breach notices.
The registrars in question are Above.com and Astutium, neither of which one would instinctively bundle in to the “rogue registrar” category.
Both companies have been told they’ve breached section 3.18.1 of their Registrar Accreditation Agreement, which says: “Registrar shall take reasonable and prompt steps to investigate and respond appropriately to any reports of abuse.”
Specifics were not given, but it seems that people filed abuse reports with the registrars then complained to ICANN when they did not get the response they wanted. ICANN then was unable to get the registrars to show evidence that they had responded.
Both companies have until February 12 to come back into compliance or risk losing their accreditations.
Domain investor-focused Above.com had over 150,000 gTLD domains on its books at the last official count. UK-based Astutium has fewer than 5,000 (though it says the current number, presumably including ccTLD names, is 53,350).
It’s becoming increasingly clear that registrars under the 2013 RAA are going to be held to account by ICANN to the somewhat vague requirements of 3.18.1, and that logging communications with abuse reports is now a must.

ICANN drops .jobs shut-down threat

ICANN has withdrawn its breach notice against .jobs registry Employ Media, opening the floodgates for third-party job listings services in the gTLD.
In a letter sent to the company earlier this week, ICANN seems to imply that it was wrong when it threatened in February 2011 to shut down .jobs for breaking the terms of its registry agreement:

ICANN has concluded that Employ Media is not currently in breach, but is instead in good standing under the Registry Agreement, with respect to the issues raised in the 27 February 2011 Notice of Breach letter.
…
ICANN will not seek to impose restrictions on new or existing policy initiatives within .JOBS as long as such conduct is consistent with the .JOBS Charter and the terms of the Registry Agreement.

The surprising move presumably means that Employ Media will be dropping its Independent Review Panel proceeding against ICANN, which was due to start in-person hearings next month.
The original breach notice alleged that the registry had gone too far when it sold thousands of generic domain names to the DirectEmployers Association to use for jobs listings sites.
This .Jobs Universe project saw DirectEmployers launch sites such as newyork.jobs and nursing.jobs.
The project was criticized harshly by the .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition, an ad hoc group of jobs sites including Monster.com, which lobbied ICANN to enforce the .jobs contract.
The .jobs gTLD was originally supposed to be for companies to advertise only their own job openings.
The reasoning behind ICANN’s change of heart now is a little fuzzy.
Ostensibly, it’s because it received a letter December 3 from the Society for Human Resources Management, Employ Media’s policy-setting “sponsoring organization”.
The letter states that all of DirectEmployers’ domain names are perfectly okay registrations — “being used consistently with the terms of the .JOBS Charter” — and have been since the .Jobs Universe project started.
The domain names were all registered by DirectEmployers executive William Warren, who is a SHRM member as required by .jobs policy, the letter states.
Nothing seems to have changed here — it’s been Employ Media and SHRM’s position all along that the registrations were legit.
So did ICANN merely sense defeat in the IRP case and get cold feet?
Read the letters here.