Registerfly Victims Are Really Stuck Now

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Registerfly Victims Are Really Stuck Now

	By John Levine Author, Consultant & Speaker
	March 29, 2007 Views: 13,100 Comments: 4

Last week I noted here that cutting off collapsed domain Registerfly will leave a huge problem for registrants. ICANN is supposed to have escrowed copies of each registrar’s registrant data, but has never got around to setting that up. This means that unless Registerfly can supply the data, there may be no record of the actual owner of their domains.

According to a story by AP reporter Nick Jesdanun, it looks like that’s the case:

ICANN said it may automatically transfer customers to a competing registrar, but it said it does not have all the necessary data, largely because of the use of anonymous proxy services.

I would ask what ICANN thinks they’re doing, but what’s the point?

By John Levine, Author, Consultant & Speaker

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Comments

Fergie – Mar 29, 2007 5:06 PM

Not only that, but things are probably going to get a lot uglier—a class-action lawsuit has already been filed against Registerfly and Enom, as well as ICANN:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/28/icann_lisbon_lawsuit_registerfly/

Enjoy. :-)

- ferg

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George Kirikos – Mar 29, 2007 7:30 PM

I hope the attorneys for the victim will make public all the documents they get during the discovery process, so we can examine what role ICANN had in the matter, and help pinpoint what can be done to improve policies in the future. We need to be able to separate the facts from the PR “spin.”

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Matthew Elvey – Jul 26, 2007 12:15 AM

Would a big judgment against ICANN be a deterrent against it screwing up again? Not AFAICT. No one would feel a significant negative impact. It just means domain prices will go up. There is no accountability. So no one will be fired or have their bonus cut or anything. Yeah, the only deterrent I can think of is the discovery process.

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John Levine – Jul 26, 2007 2:39 AM

This case is going nowhere. The case documents in PACER are all about choice of venue, since the case was filed in North Carolina, but Registerfly was (is?) in Florida, eNom is in Washington, and ICANN is in California.

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