ICANN says Joker.com and DNS.com.cn aren’t enforcing whois accuracy.
Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has sent breach notices to two large domain name registrars warning them they may lose their accreditation.
In May Joker.com and Beijing Innovative Linkage Technology Ltd, doing business as DNS.com.cn, received “notices of concern” from ICANN that they were not properly taking action when they received inaccurate whois notices. On September 30, ICANN still wasn’t satisfied and sent notices of breach of contract.
Joker.com controls 600,000 domain names and DNS.com.cn controls 300,000.
The two registrars have 15 days to remedy the breaches. On October 2 Joker.com’s Jan Legenhausen sent an e-mail to ICANN:
We are ready to take whatever action is necessary to sort this out – though we _really_ [sic]do not understand what the effective problem is. For us, it looks more like an uncertainty about the last words of 3.67.8 (“…steps to correct that inaccuracy”).
Please let me add some facts about the supporting documents/domains (“breaches”?) you sent with this notice – our impression is, that 100% of the mentioned incidents have been handled correctly by Joker.com.
Since you still seem to consider them as “evidence of breach”, i [sic] suspect that you do not agree with our method of “disabling a domain”?
This is something we explicitly asked Khalil Rasheed some time ago, when you started this discussion: Is putting a domain on “hold” (=moving out of the zone) appropriate or not, in case a whois entry is verified as wrong? We never got an indication from ICANN about this…
If my assumption is correct, this would mean that in case we change our method of “disabling a domain because of false whois data” could probably solve this issue…
Otherwise we really depend on advise [sic] what else could be done.
ICANN’s Director of Contractual Compliance Stacy Burnette responded:
Thank you for your prompt response on 2 October 2008 indicating that you have deactivated the domains referenced in our breach letter to Joker.com on 30 September 2008. Depending on the circumstances, deactivating a name as you have done could be an appropriate action in response to a Whois data inaccuracy claim.
Your email does not, however, identify the steps you took to investigate and attempt to correct the inaccurate Whois data. We further note that the Whois data concerning the domains referenced in the breach letter are still inaccurate.
If you can demonstrate that you took reasonable steps to investigate the Whois data inaccuracy claims we will forgo the monthly reporting request and consider this matter closed
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