The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has taken a hard stance with the troublesome domain registrar RegisterFly and looks ready to battle the company in court, as papers citing breach of contract soon may be filed.
In a conference call on Friday, March 2, between ICANN and RegisterFly, ICANN reportedly made it known that the registries of RegisterFly domains will not be allowed to expire, go into redemption, or be deleted during the next 30-35 days. That request for data will allow ICANN to preserve the estimated 2 million domain names registered with RegisterFly, should the company go under.
In a letter from its attorneys at Jones Day, ICANN accuses RegisterFly of willfully refusing to comply with an accreditation audit as mandated in its Registrar Accreditation Agreement. RegisterFly’s failure to fulfill the most fundamental obligations of its RAA appears to have forced ICANN’s hand—the harshly worded letter knocks RegisterFly for its failure to allow ICANN’s auditor to copy the domain company’s registration data.
Up to this point, ICANN’s announcement is the most forceful action taken against RegisterFly. The company has been accused by customer allegations of mismanagement and fraud for almost two years.
Reports were rampant that RegisterFly had been over-billing for its domains and blocking webmasters from transferring them—or even renewing them. AVNOnline.com spoke with one RegisterFly customer who knows first-hand the potential losses associated with domain fraud. Webmaster Mark Wrhel, owner and operator of SexDateNetwork, said he is concerned about the status of his company—which has nearly 500 sites and one affiliate program, SexDateCash.com—because he used RegisterFly’s "Auto Renewal" system, a system that ensured its users RegisterFly would renew the domain names at the end of the year. However, Wrhel now may be in trouble: Unbeknownst to him, RegisterFly never renewed his company’s domain names.
Last year, Wrhel’s SexDateNetwork brought in nearly $5 million in sales, and Wrhel had plans to double that figure this year. He also had plans to release all 500 of his SexDate niches, which he claims would have placed his company as the leader in the adult-dating market. Not having his domains renewed put a harsh, and expensive, halt to those plans.
Wrhel said it all began when "I got a call from my billing department explaining that RegisterFly had charged my company nearly $13,000 for the renewals when the charge should’ve been under $4,000. This was a major problem for me, as I am a small-business owner and I don’t have that kind of cash at my disposal. Not to mention that all of my domains were still not renewed."
Shortly thereafter, many of Wrhel’s sites started to shut down "due to the fact that I did not have the funds to pay for them," says Wrhel.
Wrhel made several attempts on the phone to patch up the problem with RegisterFly through its billing department, but to no avail. "Every time I was assured the problem was taken care of, my company [endured] another absurd and completely unexplainable, service charge," said Wrhel.
Wrhel, as well as many other webmasters who declined to speak on record, fear they may lose all their domain names, but with ICANN’s recent actions, there at least is hope these businesses will be saved.
According to a correspondence published earlier this week by ICANN, RegisterFly refused to turn over data, prompting ICANN to persuade the major generic Top-Level domain registries to lock down all RegisterFly domains. This will prevent them from being deleted from the registry and becoming available for re-registration by others.
When a domain registration expires, it almost always is re-registered by automated systems run by domain speculators or domain-parking firms. If the original domain owners fail to register the domain before expiration, they often are forced to buy it back at a premium.
RegisterFly did not respond to AVNOnline.com’s repeated requests for comment.
