Most of the largest domain registrars are not currently participating in ICANN’s new Registration Data Request Service, according to my research.
I used the RDRS tool to check domains managed by every accredited registrar that has over a million domains under management and discovered that at least 25 out of these 40 registrars do not currently support the service.
The number may be 26, but RDRS did not recognize any domains managed by Chinese registrar Ali Baba as valid, giving instead a “domain does not exist” error message, even for alibaba.com itself.
In total, the 25 registrars coming up blank look after over 63 million gTLD domains, about 28% of the total.
Some very recognizable brands are not in the system.
Squarespace Domains II, the new name for the old Google Domains, the fourth-largest registrar, is the largest company not participating. Together will its original accreditation, Squarespace Domains, they have over 10 million domains under management.
TurnCommerce, GMO, IONOS, NameSilo, PDR, Gname, Dynadot, Wix, OVH, Register.com, FastDomain, Name.com, Domain.com, Hostinger, Sav.com, Xin Net, West.cn, Cronon, Domain Robot, Automattic, DNSPod, and Cloudflare are also not in the system.
Oh, and neither is Markmonitor.
While I only checked 40 registrars, not the full 2,702 that were active in the July registry transaction reports, I would expect the level of support to decline the lower down the list you get, particularly as hundreds of accreditations have a trivial number of domains or are merely aliases for companies already known to not support RDRS.
It’s quite possible some of the registrars I’ve named here are planning to sign up and have just been slow to do so, but they’ve had plenty of time — ICANN has been onboarding registrars since September 20.
The level of support from the registrar industry will be critical to judging whether the RDRS project is deemed a success.
In a recent letter to the GNSO Council discussing “success criteria” for the program, ICANN chair Tripti Sinha wrote (pdf):
The Board agrees that the participation of a sufficient number of registrars with a sufficient number of domain name registrations under management will be important with respect to gathering data.
On the bright side, GoDaddy, Tucows and Namecheap are on board, and that represents about 90 million domains. GoDaddy alone accounts for 65 million, slightly more than the combined total of the 25 large registrars that are not participating.
RDRS is a system designed to simplify the process of requesting non-public Whois data by passing all such requests to the relevant registrars through a central hub.
Of course, it’s only useful if the registrars are actually in the system.
The post Most registrars are shunning ICANN’s new Whois system first appeared on Domain Incite.