mitsu-saga.md

clarification-august-2023.md

Dear Registrant,

SUBJECT :- CLARIFICATION WITH REGARD TO TERMINATION OF “MITSU INC” ACCREDITATION BY NIXI.

National Internet Exchange of India (hereinafter referred to as NIXI) is the official .IN registry for the purpose of running .IN and .Bharat domain registry and therefore for granting the said domain names, NIXI enters into agreements with various entities to be known as Registrars. These Registrars are accredited to offer .IN and .Bharat domain name, registration services to the users/ registrants. NIXI in view of the above entered into an agreement dated 24/02/2014 with “MITSU INC” appointing it as an accredited registrar for offering the registration services of .IN domain names to the users/registrants.

“MITSU INC” was appointed by the NIXI as an accredited registrar for .BHARAT domain names vide the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) dated 09.09.2014.

In January 2017, NIXI received a complaint forwarded by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India raising serious allegations against “MITSU INC”.

On 03/06/2017 NIXI received another complaint against “MITSU INC” from one Mr. Dheerendra Jaiswal, alleging that Mr. Sanjeev Goyal operating “MITSU INC” was inter-alia claiming to be an influential person with respect to NIXI, was also representing him to be an agent of NIXI, he also represented that he has his servers placed right next to NIXI’s, giving him the edge to register domains, he can get the policies at registry modified and amended as per his will, that he could influence the CEO NIXI and a lot of other such claims were made. On 20.07.2017, NIXI also received certain audio clips from Mr. Dheerendra Jaiswal substantiating the above.

On 21.08.2017, NIXI received another complaint against Mr. Sanjeev Goyal operating “MITSU INC” from one Mr. Deepak Singhal alleging mal practices of charging higher price for the domain which is in violation of the .IN Registrar Accreditation Agreement.

On 22.09.2017, pursuant to receipt of the above complaints, the legal department of NIXI was constrained to issue a show cause notice dated 22.09.2017 to “MITSU INC”. It is pertinent to mention here that NIXI is not an investigating or an enforcement authority but rather a supervisory body engaged in domain registry services.

That “MITSU INC” instead of replying to the above show cause notice preferred to have asked for confidential information such as IP addresses of the complainants, thereby loosing the confidence of NIXI. NIXI was constrained to pass a Termination order dated 20/10/2017, terminating the Registrar Accreditation Agreements with “MITSU INC”.

That “MITSU INC” thereafter invoked the Arbitration and the matter was referred to the Arbitral Tribunal under the aegis of the Delhi International Arbitration Center. The Arbitral Award was passed on 14/08/2020 thereby declaring that the Termination order dated 20.10.2017 as illegal since according to the Arbitral Tribunal the Show Cause Notice was not issued in accordance with the terms of the agreement and no efforts were made by NIXI to verify the authenticity and genuineness of the alleged complaints before passing the termination order. However the Tribunal held that “MITSU INC” is not entitled to restoration of the domain names under the Agreements.

The Tribunal has further directed NIXI to CLEARLY inform each of the erstwhile Registrants individually that the termination of “MITSU INC” accreditation was found to be illegal and that the Registrants have a choice now to shift to any Registrar of their choice.

The Tribunal has further directed that NIXI shall post a specific statement clarifying that the tribunal has found that the termination of “MITSU INC” Accreditation by NIXI was illegal and all allegations of wrongdoing against “MITSU INC” stands dismissed.

In view of the above it is hereby clarified that the termination of “MITSU INC” Accreditation by NIXI was found illegal by the Arbitral Tribunal and therefore all allegations of wrong doing against “MITSU INC” stands dismissed. The Registrants have a choice now to shift to any Registrar of their choice. In Case any Registrants require any guidance in writing from NIXI, the same shall be made available immediately.

THE SAME IS HEREBY INFORMED AND CLARIFIED TO ALL CONCERNED.

BEST REGARDS

TEAM NIXI

gistfile1.md

tl;dr: The .in Registry is badly mismanaged and you should stay away from using .in domains.

Since this isn't very well documented on the Internet, thought I'd do this, since I'm one of the hundreds of affected users here.

Background: The .in registry is managed by NIXI. NIXI maintains a list of Accreddited Registrars who are authorized to register domains under the .in and a few other TLDs. Mitsu is one of these accredited registrars.

On 30th October 2017 2:11pm, NIXI sent an email to all domain holders who'd purchased a domain using Mitsu:

This is to inform that the registrar account of your current registrar – Mitsu Inc. has been terminated by National Internet Exchange of India(NIXI) which manages the .IN Registry. In view of the termination, your registrar will not be able to provide you any domain management services for .IN or .भारत (in all supported languages). Meanwhile to maintain continuity, .IN Registry is taking over the control of your domain names and if you require any changes to your existing contact details or Nameserver associated with your domain name, you are requested to send an email from your registrant email id, as reflecting in whois records to registrantsupport@registry.in. While moving to a new registrar, you are requested to contact .IN Registry to obtain your domain authorization or “AUTH CODE” – which will be required by the new registrar to initiate transfer of your domain(s). You are requested to complete the transfer process in the next 15 days from the date of this email. If not, .IN Registry will initiate its own process to transfer your domain to another registrar as may be determined by .IN Registry.

An hour later, I got an email from Mitsu:

We are just informed by our registrants that they are receiving email from registry that one of our registrar account "Mitsu Inc" is terminated by them without giving any reasons to registrant and email also seems to be generated through Radiffmailpro.

Registrants first contact is always a registrar and if registrar is not updated about any such email then we cannot confirm that particular email . we request you to please wait for our further email.

We are contacting .In registry for details and process.

There had been some indicators that something was wrong a few days prior:

26th October : Few domain name registrants has posted in social media groups and forums that they cant modify / update the domain name servers details or unlock their domain names in the Mitsu.in registar.

27th October: Folks notice that registrant name is changed to "NIXI Holding Account (R189-AFIN)"

28th to 29th October: NIXI team is available to respond as it was a weekend and also few of the NIXI officials are attending ICANN Conference in Abu Dhabi.

29th October: Domain Name Owners Association of India (DNOAi) issued a statement [...] that the domain names are safe and that they are working with the NIXI.

I reached out to both Mitsu and NIXI - neither seemed to have any answers. NIXI had decided to unilaterally terminate the Registrar agreement with Mitsu. I wasn't given an auth code (and neither was anybody else), and my domain was stuck in limbo. I wasn't the only one, there were hundreds of other users stuck with a domain that they couldn't transfer. While the users were kept in the dark, there was a court case happening in the background. The bombay high court put a stay on the termination order since the original agreement mandated a arbitration under Delhi HC. This meant that the domains were moved to a holding account. This happened in November 2017.

The arbitration itself faced some issues before it even started. Here is a nail-biting summary of the court proceedings action:

15 Jan 2018

NIXI petitions the court to ensure that evidence on this case is not destroyed by Mitsu.

21 Feb 2018

The court refuses any interim measure of protection, since this is an arbitration dispute. Dismissed by the court.

15 Mar 2018

Arbitrator appointed by the court.

21 May 2018

Moved to 24 May.

24 May 2018

Mitsu issues a surprise! The arbitrator appointment isn't valid because "insert legal jargon". The court sighs, and appoints a new arbitrator.

15 Mar 2019

It is already 4:45 p.m

Moved to 29 March

29 Mar 2019

The Hon’ble Judge is on leave today.

Moved to 2nd Apr.

2 Apr 2019

Since the matter needs to be heard by a specific judge, moved to 12 April.

12 April 2019

Court grants leave to NIXI to invoke the arbitration clause. Next hearing listed for 3rd May.

3 May 2019

The petition could not be taken up today as there is a Full Court Reference to bid farewell ...

Moved to 13th May.

13 May 2019

Both parties are happy with the arbitration that is proceeding already. Court is done!

From this we know that the arbitration should have been in progress by June 2019. After more than another year of waiting, on 14th September 2020, I received the following email from NIXI:

As per recent Award from Arbitrator, .IN Registry hereby informs you to transfer your domain(s) originally taken from M/s. MITSU Inc. to an alternate Accredited Registrar of .IN Registry of your choice. Please view the link below for the list of registrars - https://registry.in/Accredited_Registrars

You may contact your preferred new registrar on your own for transferring your domain(s) and follow the process as may be advised by the new registrar. Meanwhile, .IN Registry has been holding your domain names.

While moving to a new registrar, you are requested to contact .IN Registry to obtain your domain authorization or “AUTH CODE” – which will be required by the new registrar to initiate transfer of your domain(s). You would also be required to pay the renewal fee for your domains from its original renewal date.

You are requested to complete the transfer process in the next 15 days from the date of this email otherwise Registry will initiate required process.

I reached out to NIXI, but they haven't given me my Auth Code, or provided any update. I don't know what they mean by "initiate required process", and have no idea what happens to my domain if I am unable to transfer them by 29th of September.

Summary

A thread about the issue at a domain forum goes to 10 pages, where people point out how this has led to monetary loss as they weren't able to sell their domains. I haven't been able to move my domains to a more secure registrar, and have been stuck with Mitsu. The emails sent from NIXI don't even clear SPF, so there were even discussions of this being fake at the start (There was a data breach at NIXI in 2017).

NIXI support has been horrible throughout this ordeal. Their communication has been misleading and confusing, leading to panic among the community. Various links on the NIXI website regarding this whole debacle redirect to the home page:

• https://registry.in/system/files/IMPORTANT_NOTIFICATION.pdf

Someone tried a petition against NIXI, but it didn't even get to 100 signatures, since it is hard for anyone to reach out to domain owners.

As a domain owner however, none of this matters to me. What matters is that I can't manage my domain - I can't renew it, transfer it, or resell it. For 3 years, I've been afraid of losing my primary domain, because NIXI didn't handle this smartly. There were so many things that could have been done better:

1. The domain owners could have been notified prior to the attempted termination.
2. Lack of updates over time.
3. Unclear directions sent over email.
4. The support responses for both parties would just be finger-pointing at the other.

Letting domain owners suffer for a legal dispute with a registrar is not okay. And for that, NIXI has lost my trust.