ICANN has denied the application to become a domain name registrar from Njalla, its co-creator Peter Sunde wrote in Twitter. Sunde may be remembered as the creator of the famous torrent tracker The Pirate Bay. The current company provides some interesting services: Njalla offers the registration of domain names while maintaining complete anonymity. In other words, it simply registers domains itself and then grants full control over them to its customers who do not even need to provide their own name and contact information.
Clearly this business model has a lot of advantages, but downsides are significant, too: a registrants confident of their anonymity are quite capable of abusing domains. This is why a lot of ICANN-accredited registrars and registries are reluctant to work with Njalla, and maybe this is why the company was denied ICANN’s registration although it had tried.
According to Online Domain citing Peter Sunde, ICANN found out that Njalla’s documents contain false information, for example, ICANN rules require that no one on the company’s team has a conviction for fraud or similar crime in the last 10 years. In the application, Njalla indicated that there were no such employees, but the inspection allegedly revealed the opposite. Outraged, Sunde assures that this could only be about himself. He was once defending his case and spent several months in prison. But, first, the accusation was not of fraud, but of copyright infringement, and second, the trial ended in 2009, that is, more than 10 years ago. However, there is an important nuance: due to his numerous appellations and movements from country to country, Peter Sunde only served the last five months of his term in 2014. This means that perhaps ICANN still had a formal reason to decline the application. Of course, Sunde disagrees with rants on Twitter over ICANN’s injustice and bureaucracy.
