I’ve been reading Battlefield Earth, so the concept of leverage is quite fresh in my mind. It’s strange how easy it is to render a supposedly powerful system useless with just a little sleight of hand. Reminds me of my days at BCD Computers when I discovered that merely changing a mouse from a PS/2 port to a serial port (or vice versa) completely destroys a Windows NT system. Paul laughed as I reminisced about this and informed me that you could also just pull the power while the machine is in the middle of a boot. A supposedly powerful system reduced to a brick in seconds.

Which brings me to today. I own four or five domains and every time one of them gets close to renewal, I get letters in the mail from Domain Registry of America. I shouldn’t say “letters”, that’s not exactly fair, these are invoices. And the dollar amounts are way out of whack (who would actually pay $30 / year for a domain name?). And yet they wouldn’t be sending these letters if people didn’t pay them occasionally. They were even careful enough to include the phrase “This notice is not a bill…”

Some of you are thinking “so what, it’s just more spam, throw it out with the rest.”  Well the problem is that these people are obviously using the public WHOIS database to drive their mass marketing effort. And according to ICANN rules, this is a big no-no. ICANN requires people with domains to put real contact info in the WHOIS database, and nobody is supposed to use that database for marketing purposes (but they do, which probably explains my inbox).

So I reported them to ICANN. Their response, two days later, was:

Please note that the company mentioned in your complaint is not an ICANN-accredited registrar. Many companies that are not accredited by ICANN offer domain registration services — some are reselling names obtained from accredited registrars.

A little digging in the legal fine print on the back of this fake invoice yields two interesting tidbits of information:

OUR SERVICES: We are a reseller of an accredited registrar with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)…

and

“We”, “us”, and “our” refer to eNom, Inc., BRANDON GRAY INTERNET SERVICES INC. (dba “NameJuice.com”), and DROA.

Both eNom, Inc. and BRANDON GRAY INTERNET SERVICES INC. (dba “NameJuice.com”) are on the ICANN list of accredited registrars.

So what’s the problem? Why can’t I report them? Because they formed a front company called “Domain Registry of America” that is just reselling their main company’s domain name services. It’s a loophole that apparently renders ICANN powerless.

Nice little leverage you have there.

Searching online for even a few minutes reveals hundreds of pages about this scam, all sorts of complaints, an “F” rating on the BBB’s website, and even some info about court cases involving the FTC. And yet these people are still around to annoy me with these fake invoices. Maybe I should send them a bill for the time it took me to file complaints, write this post, and shred their bogus invoices.