ICANN has issued a breach of contract notice to the Asia Green IT System (AGIT or AgitSys) registry. This is a Turkish company with an office in Istanbul, which owns the management rights to 5 new top-level domains - .NOWRUZ (a holiday of the beginning of spring and the new year, celebrated in many Muslim countries, but especially important in Iran), .PARS (Persian, related to Persia ), .SHIA (Shia branch of Islam), .TCI (domain brand of the Iranian Telecommunications Company, which entrusted its management to Asia Green IT System) and the internationalized domain .همراه (translated from Persian this word means “comrade”).
All of these domains were delegated at the end of 2015, but none of them were actually launched. Today, less than 10 names are registered in .NOWRUZ zone alone, and the registrations are clearly of a protective nature - probably, some kind of priority registration period in the domain still took place. In all other domains, only one name of the type nic (network information center) is registered - mandatory for the registry itself. According to the Domain Incite, ICANN's claims are that the Asia Green IT System registry has not provided the corporation with Whois data and information on operations with domain names since February of this year. And although it is clear that most likely there is simply no new data or operations, order is order. In addition, the registry also delayed the mandatory payment to the ICANN budget.
This is the third time that the Asia Green IT System registry has received breach of contract warnings from ICANN. The first two - on similar occasions - took place in 2019 and 2020. Then the company managed to eliminate the violations within the allotted time. Now the situation looks more serious. Even those same nic sites in all of the listed domain zones do not respond to requests. At the same time, a connection is still established with several of the domains registered in .NOWRUZ zone. Thus, we are clearly not talking about a DNS failure, but about problems on the registry side. Moreover, its official website agitsys.com has disappeared from the network and does not respond to requests.
ICANN has given Asia Green IT System until the end of July to correct these violations, otherwise the contract with it will be terminated. But for now it’s time to doubt even that the registry still exists. And the fate of .NOWRUZ, .PARS, .SHIA, .TCI and .همراه in any case looks unenviable.
