June 10th, 2008
Can fighting registrars win the spam wars?
The health of the Internet is what open source depends on, and few things threaten the health of the Internet as much as spam.
Spam (not the wonderful Hormel product to the right, so beloved in Hawaii and Alaska) is something most users long ago despaired of fighting successfully. But Knujon says it has a way.
Police the registrars.
Registrars, which register domain names on behalf of individuals and businesses, should be assumed to be following ICANN policy. At minimum they should have verified addresses.
But Knujon has found that dozens don’t have correct addresses on file with ICANN. Some don’t even give their country addresses.
In an email sent to ZDNet this morning Garth Bruen of Knujon said the following registrars did not list their home countries when his company sought to check them out through ICANN:
- EvoPlus Ltd.
- Hecta Media , Inc.
- Hostgator.com LLC
- OnlineNIC, Inc.
- Thought Convergence, Inc.
- Verelink, Inc.
It should be noted ZDNet found that Google identifies EvoPlus as Canadian, Hecta Media as being in the British Virgin Islands, and Verelink as being in San Francisco.
A press release identifies Thought Convergence as being in LA. Hostgator’s contact page says it is based in Houston, with an office in Brazil.
Knujon says 90% of the spam problem comes from sites registered with just 20 registrars. None of those listed above are among its top 10 offenders.
But shouldn’t every registrar have at least a street address on file and freely available through ICANN? And shouldn’t ICANN have a complete list of registrar addresses online?
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Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 06/10/08
