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by Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service

An Estonian company that registers domain names will have its accreditation revoked in near two weeks, the Internet’s addressing authority said Wednesday.

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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said EstDomains violated its contract after the company’s president, Vladimir Tsastsin, was convicted of credit card fraud, money laundering and document forgery in Estonia in February.

ICANN is in the process of organizing a transfer of the 281,000 domain name records EstDomains holds to other registrars. ICANN uttered the assembly will be de-accredited on Nov. 24.

ICANN said late last month it would take spontaneous process against EstDomains but delayed after the gang appealed the resolution, arguing Tsastin complying similar to president in June. ICANN can revoke a register’s contract if an executive of the company has been convicted of certain felonies or misdemeanors.

The demise of EstDomains couldn’t come soon enough for computer security analysts. The registrar held the domain name registrations for a trove of Web sites that hawked pharmaceutical products, sold bogus software and tried to infect users’ PCs with malicious software.

But the company’s de-accreditation comes on a technicality in its contract with ICANN rather for depressing behavior. It highlights what many computer security experts statement is a lack of oversight over the Internet to stop cajole such as spam.

EstDomains and other companies “are in essence self-policing companies who in theory are supposed to keep criminals off their networks,” wrote analysts in a report released this week detailing unethical ISPs (Internet service providers) and sway name registrars. “ICANN won’t enforce its contracts with registrars and criminals are throwing money at registrars. In the end, it hurts the Internet user and consumer.”

EstDomains offered anonymous domain name registration, which makes it nearly impossible for anyone outside of rule enforcement to find out who actually owns the domain. Most publicly listed information in Whois, which lists who owns a domain, is double-faced with a view to Web sites running scams.

Those who bought domains from EstDomains then turned to criminal-friendly Web hosting services such as McColo in San Jose, California, what one. would deflect inquiries about the legitimacy of the sites. McColo fell offline on Tuesday in the rear of its peering partners unhesitating not to support the hosting service anymore.

A white paper released in August found that 113 Web sites with fake codecs were registered with EstDomains. The white paper was written by the agency of Jart Armin.

Codecs are used to decode video compression formats. Cybercriminals oftentimes lure race to their Web sites by ostensibly offering codecs but absolutely serve up malicious software instead.

Fifty-three of those fake codec Web sites were hosted by Intercage, an ISP also known as Atrivo, whose upstream connectivity was cut off in late September due to complaints of abuse.