ICANN as a whole is a pain in the ass to deal with. We had one of our domains taken hostage because the whois information pointed to our support@ address, and

ICANN as a whole is a pain in the ass to deal with. We had one of our domains taken hostage because the whois information pointed to our support@ address, and the support staff thought it was spam. What it's supposed to help, I don't know - because accurate registration information really doesn't seem to be a whole lot of help to anyone except perhaps ICANN themselves. Anonymising services or not, nothing on WHOIS needs to work except the email address, and that can be a random gmail address, the only thing you ever need respond to is ICANNs email. It certainly doesn't help in trying to identify or contact the real owner of domains. Another gripe with ICANN is that they're zero help when trying to take down scamming/spamming domains. Adding to that, many registrars simply don't give a shit about what their customers are doing with the domains they register. At work we own <ourcompanyname>.com and the local equivalents in pretty much every country. Some scammer purchased <ourcompanyname>.<new-generic-tld> and used that in fake job ads (the 'We need a support person in <country> to process payments' etc type). The ads get taken down pretty quick (job boards are familiar with this) but not before enough people are emailing jobs@ the scammer's domain. We only heard about this because a few people emailed us pissed about the scammy behaviour. We contacted the hosting company, domain registrar (both the reseller and the actual registrar), and Donuts, all of whom either completely ignored us, or said fuck off talk to ICANN. Even having our lawyers send a C&D letter to all the various parties got us nowhere. (Hosted in Russia, registered to a fake address in NYC, etc). ICANN won't touch it without us spending up to submit a dispute, which we did, but it takes them months to process and each domain costs something like USD$1500 to dispute. In the months while the scam was active, we got something like 100 people contacting us to report it, god knows how many actually fell for it. While we're in the process of disputing that, the smartass registers a couple of new generic-tld domains and starts using those.