ICANN terminates Trustname, the first registrar de-accredited over DNS abuse

ICANN Compliance terminated the accreditation of Fewmoretaps OU, which does business as Trustname.com (IANA #4318), on August 27, effective September 11. The NetBeacon Institute calls it the first registrar termination over DNS abuse. The notice cites section 3.18 of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement, the abuse-mitigation duty added by the 2024 amendments, and four notices of breach issued June 10, June 26, July 16 and August 26. The domains in those cases impersonated financial institutions and “a government agency responsible for processing income tax returns.”

Trustname was accredited in 2023 and marketed itself as a bulletproof registrar. When NetBeacon’s public reporting first named it in July 2026, it showed 820 malicious domains per 100,000 under management, the second-highest rate in the table. Its gTLD registrations move to another registrar under ICANN’s De-Accredited Registrar Transition Procedure, at no cost to registrants. ICANN has issued section 3.18 breach notices before, to Aceville (September 2024), Ultahost (February 2025), WebNic (July 2025) and MainReg (January 2026); this is the first that ended in termination.

The voice-side counterpart is the FCC removing providers from the Robocall Mitigation Database, which bars downstream carriers from accepting their traffic. Both run on notice, a cure period, and removal.

NetBeacon concludes that enforcement of the amendments “is working.” NetBeacon was set up by Public Interest Registry, the .org registry operator. The conclusion rests on one termination.