Are Domain Owners and Investors Getting the Shaft?

[Luc]

Isn't it a breach of the Icann't Registrar Accreditation Agreement precisely ?

when i say pull the plug, i don't mean actually disconnect the port (at least not usually, but i have seen a few registrars do that too). some of them just return an error like "down for maintenance" or similar bogus error and a URL to the web based one. i perform a lot of scans as part of a portfolio monitoring service and some registrars are "down for maintenance" forever. this is usually the case with the smaller registrars.

the funniest are always the shady registrars that are only used for tasting, and the types of domains they return records for (clean) and the ones that they dont return records for (tms) with a nice bogus error.

big registrars like godaddy and nsi return up to 100 or so results per day per ip via port 43 but later force user to look it up online where a captcha is required. which is the ideal solution for preventing spam bot crawling and archiving.

i doubt icann cares to be honest with you. no one reports these violations because nothing is ever done about it, the registrars can just claim that they're having technical problems or that they pulled whois due to too many spam requests or something.