[dns-operations] The strange case of fox.com

[Rubens Kuhl]

>> 
>> As for whether the Registry / Registrar performs the actual looks
>> I don't care.  The Registry is clearly responsible for ensuring
>> that they get performed as they are responsible for the overall
>> operations of the parent zone.
> 
> no, in two ways.
> 
> if you're .DE and you have 50M delegations you're not going to be checking them. for .COM at 100M delegations it's worse.
> 
> also, ICANN does not allow the registry to take action if it knows that a delegation is bad. no action, including not notifying registrars or registrants, and especially not including changing or suspending the delegation.
> 


Actually, ICANN does not prevent such checks or suspending the delegation, neither by ICANN policy or contracts. It's up to registry policy, so as long as the policy is published, it's fair game. Registrars however hate that and punish registries by not selling their TLDs, so even though no actual policy prevents doing that, the ecosystem is resistant to do so. 

That said, there are at least 3 gTLDs from the same back-end registry operator that do not make delegations at domain creation time if the delegation is bad (the create transaction is accepted but the domain is kept with inactive EPP status and is not delegated in the DNS) and reject name server updates (or removing a hold status, or adding DS record) that would make a bad delegation be provisioned. And since one of those TLDs have a policy requiring a website to be present, that makes every domain not responding prone to being suspended by a compliance procedure (it's not automatic, though). 



Rubens