ICANN announced the accreditation withdrawal of Brazilian registrar Telefonica Brasil. The reason was the failure to pay budget contribution to ICANN. The situation seems rather ridiculous, if we consider that Telefonica Brasil is a part of huge telecom conglomerate Telefonica. Its revenue last year was $14.6 billion and the unpaid fee is $3082.12.
Obviously, the reason is not financial difficulties of the registrar, but simple negligence. But this negligence is systematic: last year the company received a warning from ICANN that it might loose accreditation because it accumulated debt of $10 thousand. That time the warning worked and all the fees were paid. This time a warning was sent in July but Telefonica Brasil representatives ignored it. Since the deadline of the warning to pay the fee expired, ICANN was forced to withdraw the accreditation.
Interestingly enough, Telefonica Brasil is one of the contenders for a top-level domain .vivo, that it intends to use as a dotbrand (the company uses brand .vivo to offer its services on the Brazilian market). However, experts suppose that accreditation withdrawal should not affect the prospects of Telefonica Brasil to get the domain. However, the company has to sign a new agreement with ICANN.
Marina Nikerova, senior deputy director at Technical Center of Internet: “This case is a curious incident, but in fact the majority of the problems even in serious organizations arise from banal and funny reasons. There are cases when Ministries and large public organizations forgot to renew the domain, when the entire data centers were turned off because personnel forgot a bucket of water in the wrong place, and now – a person responsible just didn’t see a letter with the warning on time. We’ll hope that Brazilian company manages to recover without any significant losses.
