Registerfly's Accreditation Terminated by ICANN

Punker22 writes "Effective immediately ICANN has terminated RegisterFly.com's accreditation. Between now and 31 March RegisterFly is required to unlock and provide all necessary Authinfo codes to allow domain name transfers to occur. Any and all registrants wishing to transfer away from RegisterFly during this period should be allowed to do so efficiently and expeditiously. 'Terminating accreditation is the strongest measure ICANN is able to take against RegisterFly under its powers,' Dr. Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN said today."

Comments

Political Issue

[Frosty Piss]

A lot of people don't like GoDaddy because they gave up to pressure from some corporation or another and killed an offending domain. But I've had nothing but good luck with them. Their management tools are leaps and bounds better than many of the other services I've used, and just 100's of miles ahead of most of the free DSN joints. I've transfered dozens of domains without issue.

Your dislike of GoDaddy for political reasons may be valid, but functionally, they aren't bad at all.

Re:Political Issue

[VGPowerlord]

A lot of people don't like GoDaddy because they gave up to pressure from some corporation or another and killed an offending domain.

More accurately, they caved to a DMCA request from News Corp because a list of MySpace passwords were posted on the full-disclosure mailing list, which seclists.org archives.

You can see the seclists.org posting and the /. coverage of it for more details.

What's more, GoDaddy offers to unlock domains it has shut down for a fee. I don't know about where you come from, but where I come from, we call that "extortion."

Here's where things went wrong. (Note: IANAL) In order to file a DMCA with GoDaddy, GoDaddy's relationship with Seclists.org would have to be subject to one of the first four provisions of Title 17 Section 512.
Those are:
a. Transitory Digital Network Communications (i.e. network routing, No)
b. System Caching (No)
c. Information Residing on Systems or Networks at Direction of Users (No, it's not hosted by GoDaddy)
d. Information Location Tools (Not by the definition given in this section, which is linking to it from a search site/directory)

So, where is News Corp claiming to get this justification? For that matter, since when do passwords fall under copyright?

Re:Political Issue

[fermion]

Killing a domain is not a political issue. It is a bussiness issue. One cannot run a reliable service if there is a chance that your domain might be pulled for arbitrary "offensive content"

That said, I have had no trouble with godaddy. The only reason I began to switch was thier increasing annoying registration process. It was just easier to register at another provider, a provider that gave extras for almost the same money. In particular I did not like the fact that godaddy encouraged people to register domains for the sole purpose of flipping them. I hate to want a domain only to find that someone has picked it up just to flip it.

It was in fact that process of looking for a less hostile registration process that lead me away form Godaddy. One of the places I tried, cheapnames.con, looked very similar to Godaddy. On surmise,with no evidence, this lead me to believe that godaddy might be losing lots of customers due to customer service issues, and rather than fix the service, they created another firm to try to catch them on the backend.

In the spirit of not putting all ones eggs in one basket, I have been using two registrars for the past year. I am now happy with the new provider, and recetly tried to move my last domain to the new provider. In spite of all my efforts, godaddy will not let me transfer. No matter. The domain expires soon, and I will not be in a hurry in go back.

You see, there are no political issues, just customer service issues. Although I was happy at godaddy, another service gives me a better value with less annoyances. All too often the paranoid business community creates these conspiracies to cover up their own incompetence and greed. They think that the liberals or conservatives are out to get them, when in fact the business leaders have just let their personal political beliefs distract them from the core function of a firm, which is to provide a good value in goods and service to the customer. Pretty much more of the US is agnostic enough not to care if the CEO is worrying the sheep, as long the value is good. It is, more often than not, the short sighted firms that brand themselves as "christian" or "conservative" or whatever in hopes of attracting those few people that shop on solely on the basis of politics. It can be a good strategy, because those people will buy the goods and services no matter the quality of price. Just look at Whole Food market, which I also like, but has gone down since it has become hip and mainstream political.

404?

[6Yankee]

From the first linked article above:


RegisterFly.com, which according to ICANN has its offices at 4th Floor, 404 Main Street, Boonton, NJ

With that address, what did people expect? :-)

Re:story?

[dindi]

Short:

2 owners got into power struggle. One locked the other out, the other locked everyone out.

Effect:
1. you cannot renew domains,
2. Support cannot help (just promise)
3. You do not have auth codes to move your domains away
4. Finance system does not work
5. domains are changing data randomly -> dns settings

For me: my domains were to expire, so I deposited money. Renewal failed, money disappeared, domains expired.
I spent hours on the phone, they promised to renew manually. Now whois shows it is renewed, Regfly shows it is not. Info changed back to their nameservers and "expirefly".

So some of my domains I renewed and I paid for are making pay-per-click for them, losing ranking and customers, and I cannot even change the nameservers or transfer them, because they show up as "expired" in their system.

Just make a search for "registerfly" and you will see all kinds of horror stories.

I am looking at spending over $400 for unnecessary renewals, and who knows what in revenue. I am in the process of finding a good lawyer and see what I can do about this mess :(.

I fear though, that for the time a lawsuit would go through they would declare bankruptcy and retract to their Miami Beach villas (yes one owner lives there).