ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which controls such key elements of the Internet as mime types, character sets and the DNS, has taken action against RegisterFly.com, a domain-name registry that appears to be in a protracted financial implosion. In 15 days RegisterFly.com’s customers will have their domain names moved to another register.
ICANN has received been criticised in the past over issues such as internationalisation and governance, but it’s great to see it taking a positive and proactive role in this situation. Hopefully this is the start of a new proactive ICANN, which is in an ideal position to provide leadership on a whole range of technical issues.
The step also sets a new precedent for what happens when Internet companies collapse. In the past most Internet-related companies have been acquired at knock-down prices by their competitors rather than going bankrupt. ICANN’s move effectively strips RegisterFly.com of their primary asset, their customers. The customers’ DNS records (the database records that map a name such as “involve.jisc.ac.uk” to the numerical IP machine address such as “213.133.67.196”) will be transferred to another registrar or registrars, who are presumably spending the next 15 days gearing up for the transfer. ICANN has standardised procedures to allow customers to move either own database records from registrar to another, but RegisterFly.com was not following these procedures (and appears not to have been for some time).
All of the domains have now been switched to GoDaddy.