The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) looks like they are in whois hot water. John Berryhill reports that the whois record for the group that administrates arbitration on people’s domain names has an invalid phone number. WIPO list a phone number of 999-999-9999 as their Registrant phone number. Part of the obligation every domain owner has to ICANN is to keep their records accurate and up to date. Failure to do so can result in deletion of the domain by their registrar if ICANN received a report of invalid information. John has already reported WIPO for bad data. It is not required that a registrant even share a phone number. It is only required that the administrative and technical contacts have phone numbers. However on the reporting tool there is a space to report invalid phone number for the registrant.

John Berryhill is an attorney that specializes in domain names. He once defended a client that was using proxy whois. The person who filed the complaint at WIPO cited proxy whois as evidence of bad faith. Mr. Berryhill then submitted WIPO.org’s whois record to the panel stating that WIPO had proxy information as well. I think the argument was made. Having proxy whois is not bad faith however WIPO updated their whois record to remove the proxy information.

Who are the Whois Police? Well that would be ICANN. They ask the registrar to take action within 15 days. I checked out ICANN.org’s whois record and oops. They seem to have an error too. ICANN’s zipcode is 90292 but they list 92092. Their error has been there for a few years. I reported it once but it never got fixed. I guess I should use the inaccurate whois reporting tool and see if ICANN will enforce whois accuracy against themselves.