What Are the New Domain Policy and Procedures to About ICANN’s WHOIS Verification?
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (“ICANN”), is an international non-profit corporation that plays one important role in the internet governance ecosystem. Moreover, this ranges from the Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management, to root server system management functions to ICANN New Domain WHOIS Verification.
The ICANN New Domain WHOIS Verification
In the move to ensure that the Registrant contact information (which is often referred as WHOIS record) for generic TLDs (gTLDs) are correct and valid, the new ICANN’s regulation (that came into force on January 1, 2014) has mandated that the registrar must conduct WHOIS verification in the following situations:
- New registrations;
- Amendments in the contact information on existing domains;
- The information provided appeared invalid or incomplete.
What is WHOIS Verification?
WHOIS verification, as the name suggests, is the WHOIS information verification process that involves one simple step. To be specific, the registrant will receive one email asking him or her to verify the accuracy of his or her contact information. The user can do this by clicking a validation link. However, the tricky part of this verification email is that it appears to be like one of the phishing emails sent by scammers. Because of this, there’s a high likelihood that people will ignore such emails. Further, oversight of the validation email will lead to domain suspension (which could last temporarily) due to pending verification. Fortunately, the reactivation will take as long as 48 hours upon successful verification.
What Does the ICANN New Domain Validation Cover?
Under ICANN’s new registrar agreement, all existing generic top-level domains (for example .com, .net, .biz etc.) as well as the new specialty top-level domains (like .consulting, .club, .berlin, .blog, and .marketing) will need to go through the email validation. However, top-level domains like .ca, .de and .co.uk (which are not under the authority of ICANN) are exempted from such validation.
What Does the Email Validation Procedure Look Like?
- The domain owner or registrant will receive one email requesting verification.
- The sender email will look like this: do*****@yo***********.com. with the subject lines: “IMMEDIATE VERIFICATION required for [your domain name]”.
- There is a validation link in the email, which the registrant must confirm.
- He or she will be redirected to a landing page confirmed successful verification after he or she click the validation link.
- Pending email verification will lead to “unverified” status of his or her domain. Actually, this only happens if the user did not verify within 14 days from the day he sent the email.
What Are the Consequences of Failed Email Verification?
If the verification email goes unnoticed, then the domain owners will need to stomach the risk of domain suspension. For one, their website will shut down and may not be operable for a certain amount of time. For another, they will face the risk of the scrapping of suspended domain names from the existing DNS. Now, imagine the website as the physical store of your business. What could possibly happen to your business if your website comes to a halt?
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