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Registrar Abuse Reports

The 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) requires ICANN-Accredited registrars to provide abuse contact information and take steps to investigate reports of abuse. This includes:

  1. Maintaining an abuse contact to receive abuse reports involving domain names sponsored by the registrar, including reports of illegal activity, and publishing an email address to receive reports on the home page of the registrar's website;

  2. Taking reasonable and prompt steps to investigate and respond appropriately to any reports of abuse;

  3. Establishing and maintaining a dedicated abuse point of contact to receive reports of illegal activity filed by law enforcement or other similar authorities designated by the government of the jurisdiction in which the Registrar is established or maintains a physical office. The registrar should review such reports within 24 hours of submission. This includes a dedicated email address and telephone number that is monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week;

  4. Publishing on the registrar's website a description of its procedures for the receipt, handling, and tracking of abuse reports; and

  5. Providing an abuse email address and telephone number in Whois results.

The full abuse contact requirements are provided in Section 3.18 the 2013 RAA.

If you have a complaint regarding a registrar failing to comply with these requirements, please submit a Registrar Standards Complaint Form.

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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."