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Five registrars on the ICANN naughty step

Kevin Murphy, April 28, 2012, Domain Registrars

ICANN has sent breach notices to five domain name registrars, including two owned by Epik and DomainTools, for failing to cooperate with a Whois accuracy audit.
InTrust Domains, Planet Online, Server Plan, Infocom Network and DomainAllies.com did not respond to ICANN’s 2011 Whois Data Reminder Policy audit, according to ICANN.
The WDRP is the longstanding policy that requires all ICANN-accredited registrars to remind their customers to keep their Whois records up to date once a year.
The annual WDRP audit asks registrars to state how many reminders they sent out and how many Whois records were updated as a result, among other things.
The non-compliant registrars, with the exception of Server Plan, are also evidently past due paying their ICANN accreditation fees, according to the breach notices.
All five registrars have been given 15 days to rectify the problems or risk losing their accreditations.
Given that the audit is, I believe, a simple web-based form, I don’t think anyone is going to go out of business as a result of these breaches.
It’s interesting to dig a little bit into who owns these registrars.
DomainAllies.com belongs to DomainTools parent Thought Convergence.
InTrust, which has come in for criticism for shady marketing practices under its previous management, was acquired by Epik last July.
Planet Online, meanwhile, is one of those odd registrars that hides its own contact information behind a Whois privacy service (though its web site does carry a physical address).