[jacquesm]

Shell companies are not normally used for structuring. That's a different matter entirely. A shell company is usually a holding company, not a company created in order to deceive or to bypass a hard cap on some scarce resource.

[Animats]

Well, there are the fake registrars, such as DropCatch 345, DropCatch 346, DropCatch 347, ... DropCatch 1545. Those are all ICANN-accredited registrars.[1] ICANN parcels out dropped domains among all the registrars who want them at random. Having a thousand dummy registrars improves the odds. That's definitely "structuring" to hog Internet assets.

This is possible only because, while ICANN charges each registry when they acquire a domain, ICANN refunds that if they give the domain back within some time period.

[1] https://www.icann.org/registrar-reports/accreditation-qualif...

[jacquesm]

ICANN is utterly dysfunctional, see .org debacle.

[Wowfunhappy]

The .org debacle is evidence that ICANN is corrupt, not dysfunctional. That's an important distinction.

[naniwaduni]

It's both. You could say that the .org debacle more strongly indicates corruption than dysfunction, but it's definitely both with strong ties between them.

[Wowfunhappy]

How is it both?

They knew exactly what they were doing.

[naniwaduni]

The fact that they knew exactly what they were doing does not contradict that what they were doing is dysfunctional. If anything, it is the dysfunction.

[comex]

As strange and dysfunctional as that is, DropCatch isn't trying to deceive ICANN into thinking those registrars are unrelated companies, so it's not fraud.

[blitmap]

Just FYI for others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring

I didn't know there was a formal term for this. Splitting up money transfers to avoid detection of large sums moving around.

[pjmorris]

Sounds like packet switching.

[jacquesm]

No, more like packet fragmentation and reassembly.