Will ICANN take action against "worst" Chinese registrar?

Last month, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was the target of a public complaint that it wasn't doing enough to fight spam and bogus websites. The complaint was made by anti-spam service Knujon (see disclosure at the bottom of this post), which suggested that most spam-related websites were funneled through 20 ICANN-approved registrars based in the United States and overseas. The company said that ICANN, despite being repeatedly notified that the registrars' WHOIS records were filled with false address and contact information for millions of spam sites, did not follow its own mandate to force WHOIS compliance among the worst offenders.

Now, Knujon founder Garth Bruen has formally requested ICANN to shut down the Beijing-based registrar at the top of the list, Xinnet Bei Gong Da Software. According to a new document that Bruen sent to ICANN this week, none of the WHOIS records in a sample of 11,000 alleged spam sites registered through Xinnet and reported by Knujon to ICANN's Whois Data Problem Report System were corrected in a six-month period ending in May 2008. In many cases, says the document, Xinnet does not have "any Whois record data for review while the sites are still active."