I saw this today on Slashdot. There is an ICANN registrar in China who is apparently not living up to its obligations to verify proper contact information for people registering domain names. The registrar is Xinnet Bei Gong Da Software. How bad is it you ask?
- Of 11,000 suspected spam domains registered through them, NONE were taken down in a 6 month period.
- Approximately 100 new spam sites per day being registered.
- A “significant” number of those domain registrations have apparent bogus contact information
What makes matters worse is that there appears to be some interesting langauge in the ICANN agreement that registrars are supposed to comply with:
“Registrar shall, upon notification by any person of an inaccuracy in the contact information associated with a Registered Name sponsored by Registrar, take reasonable steps to investigate that claimed inaccuracy. In the event Registrar learns of inaccurate contact information associated with a Registered Name it sponsors, it shall take reasonable steps to correct that inaccuracy.”
Reasonable steps? A little vague don’t you think? It will be interesting to see if ICANN does something here. Why does the prhase “Stop or I’ll yell Stop again!!!” come to my mind here?
–Chris
Technorati Tags: ICANN, Spammer, Xinnet
June 23rd, 2008 at 4:45 pm
This is absolutely needed. Much cleanup is required among Chinese registrars and web hosts if this country is ever going to get any international credibility. Right now China is associated with spam, scams etc. and this is hurting legitimate businesses in that industry.
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July 5th, 2008 at 12:30 am
I'm not surprised at all by this – China is associated with spam for good reason.
It'll be interesting to see what the spammers do in reaction to this – I'm sure that they'll find somewhere else to get their domains.
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