ICANN has issued a contractual compliance warning to TOP Registry, which is part of China's Jiangsu Bangning Group and operates the new .TOP generic top-level domain. According to the Domain Name Wire, ICANN's complaints are primarily related to the lack of a clear procedure for responding to complaints regarding the domain abuse. The registry also did not satisfy a number of requests to resolve domain disputes under the Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) Blocking Procedure. This procedure was developed as an alternative to the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) for new generic top-level domains; it is very popular among copyright holders, allowing offending domains to be blocked as quickly as possible. And finally, TOP Registry is late in making required payments to ICANN's budget.
The new generic top-level domain .TOP was included in the DNS root zone on August 5, 2014, and opened to public registration on November 18 of the same year. Currently, about 3.2 million domain names are registered in the domain zone. Thus, the domain is the fourth in this indicator among all new generic top-level domains, second only to the domain zones .XYZ, .ONLINE and .SHOP. And it's hard to believe that things could come to the point of terminating ICANN's contract with the Chinese registry. On the other hand, the current situation is another clear indication of the strong cooling of the Chinese domain market. ICANN has given the TOP Registry until August 15 to correct any violations.
