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ICANN Asked To Shut Down "Worst" Chinese Registrar
Ian Lamont writes "Anti-spam service Knujon has released reports highlighting how certain registrars in the US and abroad have consistently failed to live up to certain WHOIS-related obligations under ICANN's Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) — specifically, the requirement that people or company registering domains provide valid contact information. Now the firm is requesting that ICANN shut down the worst alleged offender, Xinnet Bei Gong Da Software. According to Knujon, none of the WHOIS records in a sample of 11,000 alleged spam sites registered through Xinnet and reported by Knujon to ICANN's Whois Data Problem Report System were corrected in a six-month period ending in May 2008 — and the Chinese registrar continues to register about 100 spam sites per day. In many cases, says the Knujon document (PDF), Xinnet does not have 'any Whois record data for review while the sites are still active' and the spam sites further promote 'seal abuse' by posting bogus BBB, Verisign, and other trusted industry seals. ICANN says it is investigating. ICANN has just posted a draft revised RAA that is open for public comment until August 4. However, the wording of Section 3.7.8, governing registrars' obligations to check and correct domain owners' contact information, hasn't changed."
ICANN has Chinese burglers?
If spam is a "whopper" of a problem, and burger king's "whopper" is a cheeseburger, then...
ICANN has cheezburger?
Funny aside: my captcha is "verified", something which these domains were not.
After an hour or so, though, you need to eat another one.
As it stands, I have observed some common practices of simply blocking traffic going to or coming in from IPs from certain foreign nations. For some businesses, this practice alone reduces a tremendous amount of spam without affecting normal business flows. It would also make sense for users and businesses to restrict all communications with peers outside of their borders if, in fact, it has no adverse affect to their business flows.
Ultimately, this could lead to a segmented internet where entire nations find themselves effectively cut off by policy.
I am undecided about whether or not this is a good idea, but if China and Russia won't stop their criminals, perhaps they shouldn't have a presence on the global internet. The message? Play nice or you won't be allowed to play at all! My guess is that internet sanctions would have much faster reaction than economic sanctions.
You know you're living in the 21st century when "seal abuse" does not involve clubbing large numbers of adorable baby amphibious mammals in the Arctic.
I hate printers.
Yes, it will. And those legitimate domains can get themselves transferred to a new registrar. Of course, in order to do that, I'd hope that they'd have to provide proper contact details, which would sieve out all the spammers.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Yet again, "ID cards" are proposed as a method to curb spam, at the expense of anonymous speech.
When are we going to actually fix our protocols?
http://outcampaign.org/
There's been a formal study of bad WHOIS data by the Government Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, titled "Prevalence of False Contact Information for Registered Domain Names", on this topic. They found at least 8% of contact info in WHOIS to be totally bogus. They also, as a test of ICANN, submitted 45 "WHOIS information problem reports", of which 11 resulted in correction and 33 did not. But GAO didn't break down the data by registrar.
We've been interested in this issue at SiteTruth for some time. We take a broader view of "bad" web sites than most; we consider any commercial site that lacks valid business name and address information to be bogus. Over 35% of Google AdWords advertisers fail that test. For advertisers whose ads appear on Myspace, the ratio is much higher.
Originally, we tried to get contact information from WHOIS data, but the data quality was so appallingly bad that we had to develop another approach. We have a system that looks for contact info the way a user would, looking at pages with names like "About", "Contact", and such, trying to find a user-readable street address. We also have some big databases of business addresses to check against. This turns out to work much better than looking at WHOIS data when the goal is to find the business behind the web site.
(You can see this info using our AdRater plug-in for Firefox. Download our plug-in to see the ratings for each Google advertiser as the ads go by. Unless you're already blocking all such ads, of course.)
However as this isn't really an issue of the US overriding China's rights on the internet it's not really all that important.
The registrar, who happens to be in China, but could be anywhere for all that it matters signed an agreement with ICANN to follow its rules regarding domain registration. One of those rules it that valid contact information has to be present for all domains. It doesn't as far as I can see have to lead to the person who runs the address, or to any individual involved in the domain(so it's not really an ID card), it simply has to lead to an actual someone who is responsible for that domain. That person is free to decline any requests for information regarding the actual users of their domain, and even to not collect said information at all. They are also entitled to allow said users to continue any activity which doesn't breach the agreement they signed with ICANN or any laws which are applicable to them(ie US law does not apply to a Chinese registrar, but the registrar's agreement with ICANN does). Yes there are potential issues of censorship and you might argue that requiring an individual to be responsible for the registration is wrong, it is however the agreement which the registrars signed in exchange for being able to give out registrations which will be honoured by the internet as a whole and so therefor they're responsible for holding to it.