Russian registry hit with second breach notice after downtime

ICANN has issued another breach notice against the registry for .gdn, which seems to be suffering technical problems and isn’t up-to-date on its bills.

Navigation-Information Systems seems to have experienced about 36 hours of Whois/RDDS downtime starting from April 22, and is past due with its quarterly ICANN fees, according to the notice.

Contractually, if ICANN’s probes detect downtime of Whois more than 24 hours per week, that’s enough to trigger emergency measures, allowing ICANN to migrate the TLD to an Emergency Back-End Registry Operator.

Today, the registry’s web site hasn’t resolved for me in several hours, timing out instead, suggesting serious technical problems. Other non-registry .gdn web sites seem to work just fine.

NIS seems to be a Russian company — although most ICANN records give addresses in Dubai and Toronto — so it might be tempting to speculate that its troubles might be a result of some kind of cyber-war related to the Ukraine invasion.

But it’s not the first time this has happened by a long shot.

The company experienced a pretty much identical problem twice a year earlier, and it seems to have happened in 2018 and 2019 also.

NIS just can’t seem to keep its Whois up.

According to the breach notice, whenever Compliance manages to reach the registry’s 24/7 emergency contact they’re told he/she can’t help.

ICANN has given the registry until May 29 to fix its systems and pay up, or risk termination.

.gdn was originally applied for as something related to satellites, but it launched as an open generic that attracted over 300,000 registrations, mostly via disgraced registrar AlpNames, earning it a leading position in spam blocklists. Today, it has around 11,000 names under management, mostly via a Dubai registrar that seems to deal purely in .gdn names.

Two countries could lose registrar competition after breach notices

ICANN has issued breach-of-contract notices to two small registrars, potentially reducing the number of accredited registrars in two countries to just one.

It’s sent notices to Tecnologia, Desarrollo Y Mercado S de RL de CV, one of two accredited registrars based in Honduras, and to Innovadeus, one of only two in Bangladesh.

In the former case, ICANN claims TDM has failed to respond to abuse reports and has been generally sluggish and reluctant to cooperate with Compliance requests.

In the case of Innovadeus, it claims the registrar — which records show has lost almost all of its domains under management in the last couple of years — has failed to pay its accreditation fees.

TDM has been told to shape up by May 27. Innovadeus has been given until May 26 to pay up. Failure in either case could mean termination.

ICANN picks 28 registries for abuse audit

ICANN has kicked off its annual compliance audit, and this time it’s focused on registries rather than registrars.

It’s picked 28 gTLDs based on whether they’ve not been fully audited before, whether they have more than 100 domains, and whether they show up a lot in abuse blocklists (excluding spam blocklists).

Only one gTLD per registry has been picked, which might be why the number is lower than previous audit rounds.

The audit will entail sending a questionnaire to each registry to ask how they are complying with each of their commitments under the Registry Agreement.

Registries have already been told if they’ve been picked. ICANN hopes to have it all wrapped up in the third quarter.

Bye-bye Alice’s Registry

One of ICANN’s oldest accredited registrars has had its contract terminated for non-payment of fees and other alleged breaches.

Alice’s Registry, which has been around since 1999, has been told it’s no longer allowed to sell gTLD domains and that whatever remains of its managed domains will be transferred to another registrar.

The termination comes at the end of more than two years of ICANN’s Compliance department pursuing AR for not paying its accreditation fees, not operating a working Whois service, not implementing RDAP, and not showing its company is in good standing.

The registrar’s web site hasn’t been working in many months, and until its accreditation was suspended last October it had not responded to ICANN’s calls and emails.

Its responses to Compliance since then did not help its case, so ICANN made the decision to terminate.

ICANN offers $1 million to Ukraine projects, supports Ukrainian registrants

ICANN has allocated $1 million to help protect internet access in war-torn Ukraine.

Its board of directors at the weekend voted to set aside the “initial sum” of money “to provide financial assistance to support access to Internet infrastructure in emergency situations.”

There’s an expectation that the cash will be spent “on support for maintaining Internet access for users within Ukraine”, where the Russian invasion is described as “tragic and profoundly troubling”, over the next few months, the board said.

It’s not clear yet exactly how the money will be spent, though something related to the keeping the DNS up and running would seem to be the most probable. The resolution calls for the CEO to develop a process to figure it out.

Ukraine’s ccTLD manager, Hostmaster, moved its servers into other European countries shortly after the invasion, and signed up to Cloudlflare’s DDoS protection service. It’s not clear whether it had to spend money on these moves.

ICANN’s million will come from its regular operating budget, not the stash it has set aside from its new gTLD auctions. The auction money will probably be spent on similar things eventually, but the process for allocating that is still being worked out in a committee.

ICANN also said this week that it is, as I and others suggested, exercising section 3.7.5.1 of its Registrar Accreditation Agreement to declare the invasion an “extenuating circumstance”, meaning Ukrainians who are unable to renew their domain name registrations before they expire may not lose them.

Registrars now have the option to keep these domains registered after their usual expiration date and ICANN will not send its Compliance enforcers after them.

“We encourage registrars and registries to support this action and take these circumstances into consideration when reviewing impacted registrants’ renewal delinquencies in affected regions,” ICANN said.

It’s the first time ICANN has exercised this power in connection with a human-made disaster. It previously invoked 3.7.5.1 in response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and worldwide in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Hostmaster itself has extended the redemption period for .ua domains from 30 to 60 days.

Registrar hit with second porn UDRP breach notice this year

A Chinese registrar group has been accused by ICANN of shirking its UDRP obligations for the second time this year.

ICANN has put Hong Kong-based DomainName Highway on notice that is in breach of its contract for failing to transfer the domain 1ockheedmartin.com to defense contractor Lockheed Martin.

The domain is a straightforward case of typosquatting, with the initial L replaced with a numeral 1. At time of writing, it still resolves to a page of pornographic thumbnail links, despite being lost in a UDRP case January 4.

Under UDRP rules, registrars have 10 days to transfer a UDRP-losing domain to the trademark owner, unless a lawsuit prevents it.

The circumstances are very similar to a breach notice ICANN issued against ThreadAgent.com over a case of BMW’s brand being cybersquatted with porn last month.

Both ThreadAgent and DomainName Highway appear to be part of the XZ.com, aka Xiamen DianMedia Network Technology Co, which is based in China but has about 20 accredited registrars based in Hong Kong.

DomainName Highway has about 30,000 gTLD domains under management.

Costa Rica’s only registrar gets terminated

Costa Rica no longer has any in-country accredited registrars, after ICANN terminated Toglodo for non-payment of fees.

ICANN told the company last week that its accreditation is terminated effective February 23.

It seems Toglodo owed ICANN thousands of dollars in past-due fees. The Org says had been chasing it for money since at least March last year, but had not managed to make contact.

The registrar once had a few thousand gTLD domains under management, mostly .coms, but that’s dwindled to almost nothing recently. Whatever domains remain, ICANN will attempt to transfer to another registrar.

Turkish registrar on the naughty step over abuse

ICANN has issued a public contract breach notice to a Turkish registrar over claims it’s not adequately responding to abuse reports.

Atak Teknoloji showed a “failure to take reasonable and prompt steps to investigate and respond appropriately to reports of abuse” and did not provide ICANN with evidence it responds to abuse reports, ICANN said.

These are violations of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement, the breach notice says.

The registrar is also not offering a port 43 Whois service as required by the RAA, ICANN claims.

Atak isn’t small. It has about 175,000 domains under management in gTLDs, according to registry reports.

It has until February 18 to come into compliance or risk suspension, and has already supplied ICANN with documentation that is now under review.

BMW porn site leads to registrar getting suspended

A Hong Kong registrar has had its ICANN contract suspended after failing to transfer a cybersquatted domain to car maker BMW.

ThreadAgent.com, which has about 32,000 .com and .net domains under management, attracted the attention of ICANN compliance after a customer lost a UDRP case concerning the domain bmwgroup-identity.net.

The domain led to a site filled with porn and gambling content, and the UDRP was a slam-dunk win for BMW.

But ThreadAgent failed to transfer the domain to BMW within the 10 days required by ICANN policy, leading to Compliance reviewing the registrar for other areas of non-compliance.

A December 22 breach notice led to the registrar transferring the domain to BMW last week, but it had failed to resolve the other issues ICANN had identified, leading to a suspension notice the very next day.

ICANN wants ThreadAgent to explain why the UDRP was not processed according to the policy, and how it will be compliant in futre. It also says the company is not operating a web Whois service as required.

ICANN has told the company it will not be able to sell gTLD domains or accept inbound transfers between January 28 and April 28, and must display a notice to that effect prominently on its web site.

That second requirement may prove complicated, as ThreadAgent appears to be one of about 20 registrar accreditations belonging to XZ.com, a Chinese group based in Xiamen. It has not used the domain threadagent.com in several years, and its other accreditations, which use the same storefront, are all still unsuspended.

Most registrars did NOT “fail” abuse audit, ICANN says

Most registrars did not “fail” a recent abuse audit, despite what I wrote in my original coverage, according to ICANN.

“Referring to a certain blog, none of the registrars failed the audit,” ICANN senior audit manager Yan Agranonik said during a session of ICANN 72’s Prep Week last night.

He’s talking about ME! He’s talking about ME!

“Failure would mean that there’s an irreparable finding of deficiency that can not be corrected timely or it just goes against the registrar’s business model,” Agranonik said.

An accompanying presentation reads:

None of the registrars “failed” the audit. “Failure” means that the auditee did not acknowledge/remediate identified violations of the RAA or their business practices are not compatible with RAA.

At the risk of prolonging a tedious semantic debate, what I reported in August, when the results of the audit were announced, was: “The large majority of accredited registrars failed an abuse-related audit at the first pass, according to ICANN.”

A bunch of registrar employees, and now apparently ICANN’s own head auditor, disagreed with my characterization.

ICANN had issued a press release stating that of 126 audited registrars, it had identified 111 “that were not fully compliant with the RAA’s requirements related to the receiving and handling of DNS abuse reports.”

To me, if ICANN checks whether you’re doing a thing you should be doing and you’re not doing the thing, that’s a fail.

But to ICANN, if ICANN checks whether you’re doing a thing you should be doing and you’re not doing the thing, and it tells you you’re not doing the thing you should be doing, so you start doing the thing, that’s not a fail.

I think reasonable people could disagree on the definitions here.

But I did write that the registrars “failed… according to ICANN”, and that appears to be inaccurate, so I’m happy to correct the record today.