A criticism that I often hear of ICANN is that it is a toothless body with no real ability to regulate the domain name system.
A couple of recent episodes seem to indicate that ICANN actually takes enforcing rules very seriously.
There's this letter from ICANN General John Jeffrey to .JOBS registry Employ Media. The language of the letter is totally unambiguous. ICANN feels that Employ Media has usurped the responsibility that it was given to build a TLD that would "serve the needs of the international human resource management community" in a way that instead appears to "exclusively serve the financial interests of Employ Media".
In response, ICANN has initiated a "breach of registry agreement" procedure. Employ Media must cure this breach, i.e. "implement restricted registration policies that support the purpose for which the .JOBS top-level domain was established" or risk loosing the right to operate .JOBS.
Another case of ICANN baring its teeth to enforce its rules is a letter of breach of registrar accreditation agreement sent by ICANN's compliance department to European registrar EuroDNS on April 20, 2011. ICANN alleges that following a UDRP decision to award Facebook the transfer of facebok.com (one "o") which had been registered via its services, EuroDNS failed to enact the decision.
The UDRP decision was notified to EuroDNS on 17 September 3, 2010. "EuroDNS had an obligation to implement the decision within ten business days," says ICANN in its letter, sent 7 months after the transfer should have happened according to them.
In both these cases, there seems to be a bit more to the story than what is being described by ICANN in its notices of breach, and discussions with interested parties are still ongoing. So it may be that in the end, ICANN finds that there is no breach of either registry or registrar contracts…
Whatever the outcome however, these cases show that ICANN is willing to enforce the contracts it signs with domain operators and registrars. Not such a toothless beast after all…
