Public participation site

The situational conduct for Registerfly is not an anomaly, but it is the worst in history. A 15 day arms-length probation by paper notification should perhaps be augmented by an immediate on-site audit and remedial action team instantiation ( empowered registry qualified personnel ), at the expense of the registrar in question. This could be ammended to the RAA as an option for ICANN to flex some rapid response mechanisms. The rules already in place are good, but there was never any intent in the system to handle this issues presented by Registerfly.

For example ICANN stated no "domain shall expire" for this event, as it should & that was not executed fully. Domains Have Expired, Registerfly did not fully comply, customers lost out and websites vanished. Inherent in any free market society is an implicit need for some minimum level of trust for it to function, like driving on the proper side of the road.

It's sort of a reparations issue for many. Who fixes it, and how does that fix get funded ... I suspect that what you desire may be:

A Team to deploy at a de-acredited registrar to see that these problems are abated, and hopefully information gathering is made more direct. Granted it may be janitorial record-keeping repairs but it should happen in the hands of qualified personnel.

By way of allegory.. if a child throws rocks and breaks windows, how do you deal with it? Do you spank the child and leave the windows broken? The effect of unintended consequence can be that the broken windows lead to yet more disaster. The effective response is to detect the problem, to go to the site of the problem with a window repair person, find all the broken windows and force the child and his/her parents to pay for immediate repairs. In this case of Registerfly it is Unified Names INC as the parent, and someone has to revoke & manage the rock-handling status of Registerfly. As part of many agreements there are usually punitive clauses, this would be no exception.

Jeff, you are the most sane person I know. I agree. I think that there should be more regulation and to show which are reseller accounts

The truth is that Registerfly bought the accredation of ICANN by aquiring an accredited registrar, and then extending that to all its services. Very much an end-run around ICANN. ICANN did go to the offices of Registerfly and were rebuffed on Audit Tasks that in fact are already outlined in the RAA.

I do not want to belabor the issue too much but i do think that ICANN should be able to request a strong hand in the matter of Registerfly by request to the White House / US Dept of Commerce for it's ability to intervene for reasons of business practice. It is time for the US.DOC to do just a bit of Parenting for this issue.

IMHO Registerfly's behavior has now elevated the prevailing view to be an International Embarrassment for America... and I know that greater influences should have a problem with that, and in fact they are sharp folks that read this and other logs out on the net.

March 31st should be more than just the dropping of another shoe, it should be Day 1 of redress and reparations to the harmed customers of Registerfly, regardless where they live on our planet. For many people this situation appears to be a certain mis-step without any closure for them.

And of course, i want my domain back from Expirefly.

This was the wrong thing. They are just delaying the inevitable. Registerfly needs to have the proceeds sold and distributed amongst the victims. The people who made this happen should pay in the pocket books that owned the registry and enom should pay because it is as guilty as Registerfly in this instance

I think the FEDS need to get involved. This is bigger than what ICANN can handle