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Registrars Still Ignoring ICANN Rules
stry_cat writes "Over a year ago ICANN moved to clean up misbehaving registrars like GoDaddy. They released this scary sounding advisory. However, over a year later, problems remain. One company is now publicly complaining. Some of the biggest registrars are slammed for their actions. 'Register.com is one frustrating company. The ICANN policy clearly prohibits blocking a transfer of a domain name that has expired but not yet been deleted. Despite that, a customer trying to transfer a three-day-expired Register.com domain name told us last week that they refused to give him the necessary code to allow him to transfer — unless he pays them to renew it first. ... GoDaddy (and their reseller arm, Wild West Domains) have a different problem: They still block transfers for 60 days after a registrant's contact update, even after the ICANN update specifically prohibited doing so. They freely admit it, too. ... We see a similar problem with many transfers from Network Solutions.'"
ICANN needs to figure out an enforcement policy. Perhaps it should order the root servers to stop accepting new registrations from registrars not following the rules.
The entire purpose of the Domain Name System is, or was, to enforce structure in naming on the Internet. When it was under the purview of the old Network Solutions, under the guidance of the NSF, domains were well-organized, expensive enough to deter squatting, and TLDs actually meant something.
Under ICANN, the whole system has descended into chaos. It's laughable to see ICANN trying to exert any sort of control over the registrars now, when they've spent the last 10 years doing whatever the hell the registrars wanted them to. The whole system is broken, and ICANN has no effective authority to do anything about it. Some sort of regulation with teeth is badly needed, and ICANN is completely unequipped for that sort of thing. Their feeble attempts to assert authority this late in the game are laughable.
ICANN gets most (all?) of its money from the registrars it's supposed to be policing. There's an inherent conflict of interest there.
but, if Godaddy and ICANN cannot sort out their differences, and with ICANN being the authority the Gov't put in charge, then, the Congress needs to take this matter up
Do you really want congress deciding who gets what web page?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
The fact that they get paid per domain of course is what gives them the motivation to dramatically increase the TLD space to the point where the whole concept of a TLD is completely meaningless. This also is a flawed part of the system.
The thing with the registrars, though, is that ICANN is effectively at the mercy of the registrars due to how the whole system is set up. ICANN can't just unilaterally block a major registrar, because then that registrar's customer's will be adrift, and of course the registrar will tell all of them that it's all ICANN's fault their domains don't work anymore. So, ICANN gets massive pressure from the registrar's customers (who are all losing millions per minute of course) to fix their domains, and ICANN has little choice but to comply. If they take a hard line, those customers may eventually move to another registrar, but they'll carry a lot of bitterness toward ICANN, and maybe they start lobbying their Congresspeople to pull ICANN's charter.
Add to all of this that the number of domains registered is heavily dependent on the amount of marketing these registrars do to try to convince people they need their own domain names, and it becomes apparent that ICANN is really completely beholden to the registrars, even though they technically have the ability to shut them all down.