Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Animats 2315 days ago
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...

2 comments

ICANN is utterly dysfunctional, see .org debacle.
The .org debacle is evidence that ICANN is corrupt, not dysfunctional. That's an important distinction.
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.
How is it both?

They knew exactly what they were doing.

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.
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.