icann: Breach of VeriSign Registrar's Accreditation Agreement
ICANN has delivered a warning notice accusing Verisign of breaching requirements for keeping accurate 'whois' records, and threatening termination of its registrar contract if specific errors are not fixed. The letter includes a number of examples where domain names are registered with bogus names and contact addresses. Boing Boing is reporting this as a let's get Verisign event, but consider the consequences: by enforcing whois accuracy rules, ICANN is effectively trying to outlaw anonymous domain names.
Under section 3.3 of the RAA, each ICANN-accredited registrar has agreed to provide free public Whois service giving information about the registrations it sponsors in the registry. Among other elements, the information must include: The name and postal address of the Registered Name Holder; The name, postal address, e-mail address, voice telephone number, and (where available) fax number of the technical contact for the Registered Name; and The name, postal address, e-mail address, voice telephone number, and (where available) fax number of the administrative contact for the Registered Name. [...] This notice of breach concerns VeriSign Registrar's obligations under section 3.3, under which VeriSign agreed to provide specified Whois information for each sponsored domain name. It also concerns the second and third sentences of section 3.7.8 quoted above. In summary, in those sentences VeriSign Registrar agreed to take reasonable steps to investigate and correct its Whois data in response to any reported inaccuracy. Despite these promises, VeriSign Registrar appears frequently to publish incomplete Whois data, and to routinely ignore reports of inaccurate and incomplete contact data in its Whois database. The following are seventeen examples of VeriSign's failure to comply with its contractual obligations[...] (see www.icann.org)This ICANN advisory confirms the requirement for registrars to ensure accurate contact records are provided for domain names: Registrar Advisory Concerning Whois Data Accuracy.