Sixty-Five Percent of Domain Names in Whois System Meeting ICANN's Contact Operability Requirements
About 65 percent of a tested set of 10,000 domain names registered in ICANN’s Whois system passed all of the contact operability requirements included in ICANN’s 2009 registrar accreditation agreement (RAA), ICANN executives said during a webinar Tuesday. ICANN did a second round of testing of sampled domain names in the Whois system to evaluate what percentages of domain names adhere to both the operability and syntax requirements in the RAA. Almost 84 percent of all sampled domains from North America met all 2009 RAA syntax requirements, while about 30 percent of all sampled domains from Africa met the requirements, ICANN said. Results from an initial round of testing released in August, which focused solely on adherence to the RAA’s syntax requirements, found that about 70 percent of the 10,000 domain names analyzed in that round passed all syntax requirements (see 1508250041).
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
The second round of testing of sampled domain names found that 67 percent of domain names in that sample met all syntax requirements, ICANN said in a report released in December. Ninety-nine percent of all tested domain names had e-mail addresses that met the 2009 RAA’s syntax requirements, as did 83 percent of tested phone numbers and 79 percent of tested postal addresses. The initial round of syntax testing found the same percentages of email addresses and postal addresses passed the 2009 RAA requirements, while 85 percent of tested phone numbers passed the requirements. The drop in phone number accuracy during the second testing round may be due to an increase in the incidences of missing country codes in Whois registrations among the second round’s sample domains, said University of Chicago Opinion Research Center Vice President-Statistics and Methodology Ed Mulrow. Postal addresses that didn’t meet the 2009 RAA requirements typically were missing a city name, state name, postal code or street, Mulrow said.
Ninety-eight percent of tested postal codes met the 2009 RAA’s operability requirements, as did 87 percent of email addresses and 74 percent of phone numbers, ICANN said. RAA compatibility requirements for email addresses and phone numbers involve whether ICANN can successfully deliver an email or connect to a phone number within 60 seconds of dialing, while the requirements for postal addresses require only that mail is theoretically deliverable to an address, said ICANN Operations Specialist Jared Erwin. Equal numbers of phone numbers that weren’t found to meet operability requirements were either disconnected, invalid or otherwise didn’t connect upon dialing, ICANN said. Almost half of postal addresses that didn’t meet the operability requirements didn’t have an identifiable country, ICANN said. An additional testing round began earlier in January, with ICANN to release a report in June on that round of testing, Erwin said. ICANN is considering continuing to increase the initial sample size of domains it uses to cull down for the testing sample it uses in each round. The first round of testing began with an initial sample size of 100,000 domain names before culling it for that round’s 10,000 domain testing sample, while the second round drew from an initial sample of 150,000 domains. Increasing the testing sample size to 12,000 domains may also further clarify compliance rates, ICANN said.