RegisterFly.com, a domain name registering company, experienced serious troubles this month for the millions of domain names that it holds for its customers...

Domain names in trouble at RegisterFly.com

On March 16th, the International Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN) publicly de-accredited the domain registrar RegisterFly.com for fundamental contractual breaches. BusinessWeek Online called the RegisterFly.com disaster a "train-wreck".

What happened at RegisterFly.com?

It seems the owners of the company began a power struggle that ultimately trashed their customer support. Customers weren’t able to transfer or renew their domains, and in some cases personal information on their domains were even switched to reflect RegisterFly ownership.

Here is a comment from the BusinessWeek article that discusses RegisterFly.com:

"This has been a travesty. The transfer system was designed to work between two trusted registrars and completely breaks down when one has gone bad. RegisterFly has held customers hostage by not providing the "auth codes," by arbitrarily locking domain names, by changing the "Whois" info, and by arbitrarily putting your domain into "ProtectFly", their service to protect your identity but also keeps you from transferring your name. We have lost domains and, more importantly, production Web sites have just gone dead, heading to a RegisterFly parking page instead. Try explaining this to customers depending on these sites for their business. RegisterFly's debacle has ruined businesses and lives. And this could have all been avoided with a better process in place and more in-depth criteria for accreditation. This process must be improved before the Internet can truly be used for mission-critical applications."

Has ICANN offered any assistance?

The International Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN) came under criticism due to RegisterFly.com's actions, because affected domain owners were frustrated ICANN took so long to act. Unfortunately it appears that the domain registration system has some serious drawbacks because ICANN, which is the only authority in charge of domains, had little power to wield. Here is a March 7th clip from the ICANN Blog that provides some insight into ICANN's efforts:

"ICANN is not a regulator. We rely mainly on contract law. We do not condone in any way whatsoever RegisterFly’s business practice and behavior. The options for customers to transfer their names to another registrar at this stage are limited. We will advise if we have more information on this point. Last Friday, ICANN convened a telephone conference among those needed to implement a plan that will help cease unintended deletions. This will prevent names from being deleted from the registry and becoming available for re-registration by others. RegisterFly has assured us (for what that is worth) that they will process such requests as soon as they are again technically operational. We will keep a close eye on this. We do hope this information is helpful and provides some small level of comfort in what is clearly a stressful time for registrants and others affected by these events. Check in at both here and at our website www.icann.org where these issues (amongst others) are being discussed."

ICANN's March 16th posting announced the de-accreditation of RegisterFly, and indicated that "ICANN intends to hold a forum to discuss the reform of the Accreditation policy and process at its Lisbon meeting in a week's time." It’s unknown if there will be any solutions from this meeting, but there’s no doubt that ICANN needs more power over future companies like RegisterFly.

Who has been affected by this RegisterFly disaster?

Many hundreds of thousands of people and businesses have been negatively affected by this event. Some may have no idea, until their domain names stop working. If you’ve been having problems with your domains, or your sites aren’t showing up at all, I recommend that you contact your domain name provider (who may also be your web host) as soon as possible to see if you’ve been directly affected by RegisterFly issues.

Even a close friend was affected

It turns out that one of my friends was a victim in this RegisterFly “train-wreck”. I asked her how she’s been affected by it:

“Well, I still have control of my domain - for the time being. A judge handed control of RegisterFly back to the alleged bad guy, so who knows what'll happen. I got some of my domains out, but my grandma's appears to be gone for good and a few others are still stuck. The ridiculous thing is that this whole debacle boils down to a lovers' quarrel between the two guys who were vying for control of the company. They busted up and the company fell apart. That's a flimsy foundation for two million domains to be sitting upon.”

She is responsible for a number of different domains, and I couldn’t help feeling bad for her and this unfortunate situation she’s been thrown into. I’ve used a very affordable web hosting and domain name service for many years now, called Netfirms, who holds numerous accreditations and has very reliable services. So far, Netfirms has been totally unaffected by these events. When I recommended Netfirms to my friend, here was her response:

“Thanks for the recommendation. I'm very undecided about exactly what to do, but I must take action and soon. It's pretty frightening as up until the scandal broke, I was satisfied with RegisterFly. There are many people who have been badly [hurt] by this fiasco.”

In summary... 

The best that I can suggest to anyone is to find a domain name provider that has many well-known accreditations and a good reputation. You can do this several ways. One, you can contact friends and business associates who have web sites, ask them who they use and how reliable they have been, etc. If you do searches online yourself and you find some that are appealing, you could also do web searches on these company names in the news or the Better Business Bureau sites to see if they’ve had any negative reports about them before you decide to rely on them to handle your domain names.