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Jun. 5, 2007

Overall, thousands of RegisterFly clients and their domain names were left in limbo, earlier in 2007, after an ugly dispute between the two original founders resulted in numerous personal attacks, hostile litigation and the company ultimately being stripped of its ICANN accreditation.

Co-founder Kevin Medina, who was initially fired by RegisterFly's board in February over allegations of mismanagement and misuse of company funds, was eventually awarded sole control of the company by a Newark, New Jersey court.

ICANN took legal action against Medina, forcing him to accept a transfer to another registry. At one point, RegisterFly customers began to feel like the situation was a lost cause.

Fortunately, this potential disaster was averted last Friday when United States District Court Judge Manuel L. Real issued a permanent injunction against RegisterFly.

This week, domain registrar and Web hosting provider Go Daddy announced that ICANN would broker the transfer of approximately 850,000 domain names belonging to RegisterFly customers over to Go Daddy.

The domain asset deal, which many industry insiders had been speculating for the past couple of months, brings the total number of domains Go Daddy manages to 20 million. The news comes as a relief to RegisterFly customers, whose domain names have been locked up for the past several months.

"When everything became apparent that RegisterFly was having difficulties, there were a lot of frustrations [voiced] by customers," says Bob Parsons, founder and CEO of Go Daddy. "We received many contacts... We had somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 people get in touch with us and we were asked repeatedly if we would step in."

Soon afterwards, Go Daddy and RegisterFly discussed the possibility of RegisterFly transferring its domains to Go Daddy. With promises of ICANN litigating in one way or another, Parsons says that Go Daddy and RegisterFly approached the Internet governing organization with the agreement. ICANN subsequently accepted enabling the transfer to go ahead, which Parsons says should completed by the week's end.

"It will be an unusual type of transfer, in that normally a transfer is initiated by a customer and then they'll purchase an additional year," says Parsons. "Since there's no additional year, this is a transfer that has been sanctioned by ICANN, everybody moves over in bulk."

Once the transfer is completed, the domain owners will receive an email from Go Daddy, Parsons says, detailing all the pertinent information, such as how to initiate and manage their account and how to purchase any additional services.

And although Parsons hopes the newly migrated domain owners will stay with the Web hosting provider, he says it is ultimately their decision as to whether or not they will make Go Daddy their new home.

"If they decide they're not happy moving over to us, they're free to transfer somewhere else," says Parsons. "That's also something they weren't able to do at RegisterFly."

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Source: The WHIR