Freenom Fail To Comply With ICANN Suspension

The battle between ICANN’s Compliance team and Freenom has got plenty of in depth coverage by Kevin over the last few weeks. It’s been an interesting topic to follow.

However ICANN finally prevailed and was able to impose the suspension which is scheduled to run from 26 August 2015 at 00:00 UTC to 24 November 2015 at 00:00 UTC.

The terms of the suspension are clearly laid out in ICANN’s written notice to Freenom and include clear instructions on how the registrar should communicate the suspension to the public:

Notice on OpenTLD’s Website
During the suspension period, OpenTLD must prominently display the following on its website on all
pages where Registrar Services, as defined by the RAA, are offered:
No new registrations or inbound transfers will be accepted from 8 July 2015 through 6 October
2015.
This notice must also include a link to the notice of suspension from ICANN.

Yet if you go to Freenom’s site it’s impossible to find the suspension notice.

Here’s a screenshot of their main page:

Do you see a notice of the suspension prominently displayed? I certainly don’t ..

So where is it?

If you scroll down the page you’ll see three columns of text below the fold:

I’ve highlighted one line of the text:

No new gTLD registrations or inbound transfers will be accepted from 26 August 2015 through 24 November 2015.

That’s buried at the bottom of a rather misleading bit of text where they claim to be “reviewing” their “cost price domain program”.

They aren’t reviewing it, unless having their ICANN accreditation suspended is their idea of a “review”.

Read the rest of this work of fiction:

Freenom is the registry operator of Free Domains with the .TK, .ML, .GA., .CF and .GQ domain extension. In the last year Freenom also provided cost price domain registrations in other top level domains, such as .COM.

As we are currently reviewing this program we do not accept any new Cost Price domain registrations or inbound transfers until the end of this year. During and after this review period all existing cost price domain registrations will stay fully activated and existing registrants can renew these domains as usual.

No new gTLD registrations or inbound transfers will be accepted from 26 August 2015 through 24 November 2015.

Nowhere do they state clearly that they are being forbidden from processing new registrations or transfers.

So not only do they get themselves suspended by ICANN, fight the suspension, lose, now they can’t even comply with the suspension requirements?

Wow.

And in case you haven’t read it yet, here’s the original notice from ICANN about the suspension:

[spiderpowa-pdf src=”https://www.internetnews.me/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/serad-to-zuurbier-23jun15-en.pdf”]serad-to-zuurbier-23jun15-en
Update September 2nd 2015

FreeNom have updated their homepage to display the following notice at the bottom of the screen:

So they are more compliant than previously, but it’s still being presented as part of a “review” and I honestly doubt that a member of the public would realise what’s actually going on unless they clicked the link to read the ICANN notice letter (which I included above)