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Keeping Registration Data Accurate

Registrar Obligations

ICANN requires that registrars must send reminders to registrants to provide accurate and reliable contact information. If the domain name registrant knowingly provides inaccurate information, fails to update information within seven days of any change, or does not respond within 15 days to an inquiry about accuracy, the registrar must suspend or cancel the domain name.

Additionally, any Internet user can contact ICANN Contractual Compliance concerning a suspected inaccuracy of registration data using the complaint form available here.

After ICANN Contractual Compliance receives and confirms an inaccuracy complaint, it contacts the relevant registrar to take appropriate measures to investigate the claimed inaccuracy. Under the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA), registrars are also required to reverify and validate certain RDDS fields in response to a registration data inaccuracy claim.

Registry Obligations

In order to verify and ensure the operational stability of registry services, as well as to facilitate compliance checks on accredited registrars, registries provide ICANN with weekly, specific, up-to-date registration data, per their agreement with ICANN. Registries also are required, in exceptional cases such as failure of a registry, to provide bulk access to thick registration data to ICANN.

Registrant Obligations

Per the RAA, registration agreements with registrants must include provisions directing them to "provide accurate and reliable contact details and correct and update them within seven (7) days of any change during the term of the Registered Name registration." Should the registrant not comply with the above or fail "to respond for over fifteen (15) days to inquiries by Registrar concerning the accuracy of contact details", the registrar may suspend and/or cancel the registration.

For more information on renewing your domain name, see here.

Accuracy Reporting System (ARS)

Between December 2015 and June 2018, ICANN org published an Accuracy Reporting System (ARS) report every six months. ICANN org made the decision to pause further reports based on the adoption of the Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data following the adoption and subsequent enforcement of the GDPR.

Additionally, inquiries made by registrars as to whether it is permissible to provide certain registration data to ICANN in response to a WHOIS inaccuracy ticket issued by ICANN Contractual Compliance because of the ARS caused ICANN org to reconsider continuing with the system.

For more information on Registration Data Accuracy Requirements and GDPR, see here.

For historical information regarding the ARS Project see here.

For historical reports and webinars related to the ARS project see here.

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Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."