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Comment by cat199 | Hacker News Reader

if shell companies are fraud, much of the economy is in trouble

Shell companies are not normally used for structuring. That's a different matter entirely. A shell company is usually a holding company, not a company created in order to deceive or to bypass a hard cap on some scarce resource.

Just FYI for others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring

I didn't know there was a formal term for this. Splitting up money transfers to avoid detection of large sums moving around.

Sounds like packet switching.

No, more like packet fragmentation and reassembly.

Well, there are the fake registrars, such as DropCatch 345, DropCatch 346, DropCatch 347, ... DropCatch 1545. Those are all ICANN-accredited registrars.[1] ICANN parcels out dropped domains among all the registrars who want them at random. Having a thousand dummy registrars improves the odds. That's definitely "structuring" to hog Internet assets.

This is possible only because, while ICANN charges each registry when they acquire a domain, ICANN refunds that if they give the domain back within some time period.

[1] https://www.icann.org/registrar-reports/accreditation-qualif...

ICANN is utterly dysfunctional, see .org debacle.

The .org debacle is evidence that ICANN is corrupt, not dysfunctional. That's an important distinction.

It's both. You could say that the .org debacle more strongly indicates corruption than dysfunction, but it's definitely both with strong ties between them.

How is it both?

They knew exactly what they were doing.

The fact that they knew exactly what they were doing does not contradict that what they were doing is dysfunctional. If anything, it is the dysfunction.

As strange and dysfunctional as that is, DropCatch isn't trying to deceive ICANN into thinking those registrars are unrelated companies, so it's not fraud.

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