ICANN Terminates Registrar Accreditation Agreement For Registerfly - ICANN has issued formal notice of termination of its accrediation agreement with registrar Registerfly.com. According to the letter, Registerfly.com will no longer be allowed to operate as an ICANN-Accredited Registrar effective March 31.

Whois Task Force Issues Final Report - The Whois Task Force has sent its final report on Whois services to ICANN's GNSO Council. The task force was in agreement that new mechanisms to restrict some contact data from publication should be adopted to address privacy concerns, but did not arrive at supermajority support for any of the proposals it considered.

Picks To Click

• McAfee SiteAdvisor: a global road map of the riskiest and safest TLDs.
• ICANN launches a public participation site for the Lisbon meetings.
• A co-chair of the IETF ENUM Working Group describes four ENUM camps.
• Current CIRA members must re-enroll to maintain their membership status.

Update On Registerfly - During the past week, ICANN has posted in its blog several updates on the RegisterFly situation, and many unhappy customers have posted followup comments. On March 8, a U.S. District Court judge handed control of RegisterFly back to Kevin Medina, the original CEO, resolving a dispute over ownership of the company. ICANN has indicated that this resolution "does not alter RegisterFly obligations to immediately cure the breaches of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement, as noticed by ICANN." On Feb. 21, ICANN had sent a letter to RegisterFly giving 15 working days' notice of several breaches of contract. ICANN could give notice of termination of the registrar's accreditation as of Wednesday, March 14.

.MOBI Domain Tops 400,000 - DotMobi, the registry operator for the .mobi domain, has announced that more than 400,000 .mobi domain names have been registered in 104 countries since the .mobi launch last fall.

Chinese Registry Promotes .CN Names - The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), registry for China's .cn domain, has decreased the first-year registration fee for .cn domain names to one yuan (approximately $0.16 Canadian) until May 31.

Picks To Click

• ICANN publishes an interesting factsheet describing the root server attack on February 6.
• Nominum president Tom Tovar describes how next-generation Internet applications are causing a substantial growth in the number of Domain Name System (DNS) queries.
• In his blog, John Levine explains why he left the ICANN At Large Advisory Committee.
• Laboratory tests on internationalized (non-ASCII) top-level domain names show no technical problems. The tests were done under contract to ICANN.
• Musician's Friend, Inc. wins a dispute over musiciansfriend.ca.
• ICANN publishes a note on "How to Get Help When You Have a Problem with Your Registrar".

Canadian Privacy Commissioner Issues Finding On Registrant ID Requirements - In his blog, Michael Geist has pointed out a finding by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada in which the Assistant Commissioner comments that it is appropriate for a domain registrar to require personal identification in order to change the administrative email address for a domain registration.

ICANN Updates RegisterFly Situation - ICANN has provided an update on the situation with its accredited registrar RegisterFly. In addition to its letter of Feb. 21 giving formal notice of several breaches of RegisterFly's accreditation agreement with ICANN, ICANN has outlined its unsuccessful attempts to audit RegisterFly and to obtain registrant information. ICANN has provided notice that it will file a suit to require RegisterFly to turn over the requested data and to compel an emergency audit. Steps have also been taken to prevent names registered through RegisterFly from being deleted from the registries and becoming available for re-registration by others.

Picks To Click

• Stephen M. Cohen, convicted in 2000 of illegally obtaining the sex.com domain registration, has told a court he is jobless and broke, and has asked that the $65 million he owes to the rightful domain holder be erased.
• The .tel domain has been added to the root zone.
• Musician's Friend, Inc. wins a dispute over musiciansfriends.ca.
• Motorola loses a dispute over motorazr.com.
• Google has been unable to acquire the Chinese domain name gmail.cn.
• The proposed .museum registry agreement has been posted for public comment.