Domain name of the most popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay has been suspended because the contact details of the registrant hadn’t been confirmed. The Register reports that visitors of thepiratebay.org webpage are greeted with the information that the domain has been blocked and its administrator has to confirm the data for re-activation.
Thus, The Pirate Bay fell victim to a Whois verification practice that is desperately and in many ways correctly been criticized by the domain community. According to the rules adopted by ICANN in 2013 registrars are obliged to check Whois contact data that is filled in by the registrant of the domain. As a matter of fact, checking contact details is merely sending a message to an email specified by the registrant. The same rule applies when the registration is automatically renewed each year. The weak spot of this procedure is that the user might not receive or simply not notice a message from the registrar (it might go into the spam folder, for example). But even if the message does reach the addressee, the cons remain. To confirm the contact details, registrant has to follow a link in the message received. However, this practice is commonplace in phishing attacks and many users simply mistrust such emails.
As a result a huge amount of legit webpages turns out to be blocked without any serious reasons. However, the situation with The Pirate Bay is obviously different. Attorneys that protect copyright of film and record companies for sure will become fans of the existing Whois verification procedure.
