Prevent another Parava By Mining Domain Registry Notes

Data mining could identify problem registrars ahead of it’s too late.

It’s always a headache when an ICANN-accredited domain name registrar loses its accreditation. But often times that’s just the beginning, as clients of Parava Networks learned last year.

Parava was allegedly bilking its clients by accepting payments for multi-year renewals, and then only renewing the domain names a year at a time.

This becomes fairly evident when you look at VeriSign’s monthly registrar notes. Without doing a statistical analysis, you’ll still see that Parava has an higher percentage of one year renewals vs. longer term renewals when compared to other registrars.

In order to prevent the next Parava, RegisterFly, etc., ICANN ought to mine these notes for anomalies. Of course, you need to take into consideration some registrars that are owned by domain investors. They’re likely to renew a year at a time.

But retail registrars ought to have a fairly consistent percentage across all type of registrations. If not, ICANN ought to flag the registrars and see if it can understand why. Is it since the registrar doesn’t promote multi-year renewals, or doesn’t offer a price break?

Either way, I’d love to see a statistician analyze this information for any red flags. It would save a lot of heartache in the future.