ENom and Moniker “On Notice” — ICANN Puts
eNom and Moniker were named in “Worst Spam Offenders” note.
In the words of Stephen Colbert, ICANN has put eNom and Moniker “On Notice”. The two registrars were named in a recent note from KnujOn titled “The 10 Worst Registrars in terms of spam advertised junk product sites”.
That title is a bit misleading, or perhaps I’m the only one who doesn’t quite understand how KnujOn calculated which registrars were worst. The note (pdf) considered a number of factors for determining which registrars has the most “spam advertised junk product sites”:
Noted Sites: Raw count of noted sites advertised through spam
Proportion of Noted to Total: Proportion of total spam-noted to total domain count
Raw Aggression: Number of spam instances advertising domains at this registrar
Proportional Aggression: Proportion of total spam instances to the total domains at the registrar.
Overall Score: An overall rating based on each of the above results
Inaccuracy Count: Total count of inaccurate registration records
Inaccuracy Rating: Proportion of inaccurate records to total domains at the registrar
Trademark Factor: Volume of sites noted for featuring trademarked brands
The note did not consider which email addresses were used to send spam, but rather which domains these spam emails sent traffic to. As you can see above it also considered the percentage of bad whois records and domains that included trademarks.
The notes suggests that eNom is heavy on trademark domains (3rd place) while Moniker has a lot of inaccurate whois data (0.4% of records). I’m not sure how this data was collected and it certainly could have been designed to stack the odds against these registrars, which are known for managing sizable domainer portfolios.
Regardless, ICANN felt it worthy enough to send a notice to these registrars, with a particular emphasis on whois inaccuracy. ICANN sends regarding 75 “enforcement” notices each month.
