Three cheers for ICANN!

I never thought I’d see the day!

ICANN found it’s dentures down the back of the sofa and taken a bite out of the criminals domain registration empire. ESTDomains will no longer be a registrar as of Nov 12th. [pdf]

So I’ve got a question… Who’s got the balls to take on ESTDomains problems “customers” ?

“ICANN Seeks Expressions of Interest from Registrars to Receive Bulk Transfer of Names from De-Accredited Registrar EstDomains”

I recently presented at APWG to encourage the anti-phishing community that registrars and registries can actually act rather than pleading innocence or the classic “our hands are tied” type excuses. In the case of fast-flux they are probably the only ones that can help in fact. I encouraged participants to point out that registrars and registries are guilty of acting illegally in many jurisdictions by facilitating illegal or infectious sites.

The general stance was that if Directi can clean them out then so can anyone else.

I pointed out that between 2 registrars (EST and Klik/Vivids) about $1.5M of revenue had taken place with Directi (who gives a healthy proportion of it to Verisign Etc…). I concluded with a slide to motivate participants to “Hug a Registrar” and I implore our readers to help out too. Anyone scoring over 30% on this uribl page is a prime candidate for advocates in the community to reach out and “help”.

So here is my top 5 for today:

#1 Moniker – Infested with spammers and pirated software sites. (MSOffice isn’t €79.95 delivered in a zip file)
#2 XIN NET – This is where the Pill spammers moved to and have given the .cn TLD a bad name.
#3 35 Tech & OnlineNic – Same as above but with more variety in pill sites and some casinos thrown in too.
#4 Planet Online – (Surprised to see them so high) Home of the unique URL “snowshoe” spammers ? almost legit ? The real world doesn’t care for their bulk and whois protected domains (via directi’s Logicboxes), or fake contacts.
#5 Dynamic Dolphin – Owned by Scott Ricter’s Media Breakaway, formerly bankrupted OptinRealBig . MS won cases against him in New York in 2005. This accreditation is probably against ICANN’s policy. These days they generally annoy via social networks.
#Bonus – *.directNIC [Mikko's open letter]

This is almost 2 years too late and took far too much media attention to shake their tree. The worst of the criminals left EST for other registrars after the “defecation meets the rotary oscillator” in August, but never the less, that (so I’m told) this is quick for ICANN

Hip Hip…