ICANN Culls Three More Domain Name Registrars

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ICANN Culls Three More Domain Name Registrars

	By Michele Neylon MD of Blacknight Solutions
	August 11, 2009 Views: 12,649 Comments: 5

ICANN has announced that three more domain name registrars have lost their accreditation due to non-compliance with the RAA.

The three registrars have been informed that their agreements with ICANN will not be renewed.

South American Domains (NameFrog), Simply Named and Tahoe Domains have been sent letters by ICANN outlining the decision and the reasons for it.

So what now?

On the plus side, as ICANN’s compliance team is becoming more active in pursuing non-compliant registrars the processes for handling the domains held by de-accredited registrars is becoming more finely tuned.

Expect to see an announcement very shortly asking for other registrars to takeover the various portfolios, though this time round they are incredibly small.

According to the latest figures I was able to access the breakdown would be as follows:

Namefrog appears to have less than 300 gTLD domains
Simply Named about the same number
Tahoe less than 250

So why did they lose their accreditations?

Namefrog did not have a whois server
Simply Named wasn’t escrowing registrant data and hadn’t paid their ICANN fees
Tahoe no data escrow and owed fees to ICANN

In related news, Lead Networks are now seeking arbitration!

By Michele Neylon, MD of Blacknight Solutions

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Comments

It is good to see published policies implemented consistently Suresh Ramasubramanian – Aug 11, 2009 3:52 AM

I heartily look forward to some further actions of this sort.

# 1 Reply | Link | Report Problems

Name Frog Stephen Douglas – Aug 11, 2009 12:20 PM

When Namefrog was feeding Snapnames their expiring domains, I bought some of them (without looking at who the holding registrar was for the domains at the time). After I purchased the domains from Snap, I quickly discovered the inability to manage those domains (Namefrog was using Logicboxes’ clumsy interface, if I remember correctly). It was torture trying to transfer those domains away from Namefrog. I don’t remember if I lost any domains back to them, but it was obvious to me at the time that they were making it hard for domain owners to renew/transfer domains NF thought were valuable, in order for them to resell them on Snapnames or other auction platforms.

It’s been several years since I’ve had to deal with NF, but any registrar that has the name of an animal, “monkey, frog, hippo, etc”, stay away! I’m glad ICANN FINALLY removed them. Geez, only took them three years to do it!

# 2 Reply | Link | Report Problems

Fallout from the end of Domain Tasting and reduced PPC revenue? John McCormac – Aug 12, 2009 9:50 AM

I was comparing the growth in the main TLDs for 01/January/2009 - 01/August/2009 with the 01/January/2008-01/August/2008 and there is an indication that the growth rates are slowing down. The .com was only at 51.86% of the 2008 figure. The .net is only 35.87% of the 2008 figure. The .org is curiously at 62.22% of the 2008 figure.

The end of the Domain Tasting in .com and .net seems to have had an effect. Many of these drop registrars may no longer be needed. This coupled with the falling PPC revenue would make a lot of the domains being dropped non-viable for parking/PPC.

# 3 Reply | Link | Report Problems

Good Show Virendra Gandhi – Aug 18, 2009 3:08 PM

Why not cull all of them and have just one dot suffix.

# 4 Reply | Link | Report Problems

That comment doesn't make any sense.I was Michele Neylon – Aug 18, 2009 3:14 PM

That comment doesn't make any sense. I was talking about _registrars_ NOT registries

# 5 Reply | Link | Report Problems

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