Data mining could identify problem registrars before it’s too late.
It’s always a headache when an ICANN-accredited domain name registrar loses its accreditation. But often times that’s just the beginning, as customers of Parava Networks learned last year.
Parava was allegedly bilking its customers by accepting payments for multi-year renewals, and then only renewing the domain names a year at a time.
This becomes fairly evident when you look at VeriSign’s monthly registrar reports. Without doing a statistical analysis, you’ll still see that Parava has an higher percentage of one year renewals vs. longer term renewals when compared to other registrars.
In order to prevent the next Parava, RegisterFly, etc., ICANN should mine these reports for anomalies. Of course, you need to take into consideration some registrars that are owned by domain investors. They’re likely to renew a year at a time.
But retail registrars should have a fairly consistent percentage across all type of registrations. If not, ICANN should flag the registrars and see if it can understand why. Is it because the registrar doesn’t promote multi-year renewals, or doesn’t offer a price break?
Either way, I’d love to see a statistician analyze this information for any red flags. It would save a lot of heartache in the future.
Antony Van Couvering says
Anyone can do this. I think that asking ICANN to do it is to invite a lot of bureaucracy and perhaps not solve the problem. It might be best left to — drumroll — journalists…
Andrew Allemann says
@ Antony – I have a better idea. ICANN could take just a tiny sliver of the $10M+ it has spent on a current project to make itself bigger and more important and spend that on doing its job correctly; i.e. ensuring compliance with it’s existing contracts 🙂
Michele says
ICANN and its staff has enough to do already.
If there is an issue with a registrar not renewing domains etc., then submit a complaint and ICANN Compliance can take action, but expecting ICANN to do this in not reasonable.
As Antony said, a journalist would be in a better position to do it.
Michele
jorge says
Great idea. Sounds like a fun project.
John Berryhill says
There has been an ongoing incident in which InternetX renewed and/or registered a number of domain names based on fees collected by one of their resellers, and the reseller subsequently absconded with the money.
InternetX has taken the position that since they did not receive the payment from their own reseller, that the domain registrants need to pay again, to InternetX directly.
Accordingly, that is another registrar to keep an eye on, as they have stated they will be deleted a number of domain names prior to the registry expiration date.
mansour says
Andrew, I agree with you. Your point is well taken.
All registrars should provide proof to their customers that their business is sound, especially the top ten registrars, not by offering discounted domain registration, or advertising, but rather through a statement of profitability in their business. I do not wish to place my domain names in the hands of a registrar that is a few million dollars in debt, even if they are offering domain registration and renewal below cost. I own over 2600 domain names and I can only trust Tucows since they are a public company and I can find out their financial stability the same as their investors. It is very easy for any registrar to spend the money they have collected for up to 10 years in advance, and no one knows if they will still be in existence 10 years from now. The fall of Register fly was a wakeup call for many domainers to search for a safe place to keep their domain names. I disagree with you that no registrar offers a discount for multiple years of registration. Godaddy is your biggest example.
Michele says
@Andrew
ICANN compliance has been doing a lot in recent months to ensure that registrars are compliant with existing contracts.
Patrick Mevzek says
If anyone want to provide ideas to other graphs/tables to generate from ICANN registries reports than those I already do on http://www.dotandco.net/ressources/icann_registries/ and http://www.dotandco.net/ressources/icann_registrars/ feel free to let me know, with some outside help I would be happy to see what is possible to do that could be helpful to the public.