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GoDaddy, RegisterFly, and ICANN Reach Agreement

By: Jed Nottingham

Posted: 05/29/2007

NEW YORK - GoDaddy, a leading domain-name registrar, today reached an agreement with RegisterFly and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to transfer over RegisterFly's portfolio — which includes 850,000 domain names — to GoDaddy. The move will help resolve problems involving hundreds of thousands of domain names worldwide.

The deal, reached with the support of the Internet's key oversight agency, means customers of RegisterFly once again can renew domain names or transfer them elsewhere if they do not want to stay with GoDaddy.

Those names had been in limbo following financial and operational troubles at RegisterFly. In some cases, individuals, groups, and businesses were finding their websites inoperable because they could not properly renew their addresses before they had expired, nor could they move them to another company.

"For the past few months, they were pretty much in the dark and there was a lot of frustration there," said GoDaddy Chief Executive Bob Parsons. "[Now] all that is a thing of the past."

Parsons refused to disclose terms of the transfer deal, saying they are confidential. But, he said GoDaddy isn't buying RegisterFly, so any lawsuits and other previous disputes remain with RegisterFly.

The deal calls for RegisterFly to give GoDaddy its customer databases. Transfers of names will be automatic, and GoDaddy will notify existing RegisterFly customers about the switch and setup a Web page and telephone hot line. GoDaddy expects to start running the names within a week.

ICANN, the organization in charge of the Internet's addressing policies, said the deal was good for RegisterFly customers.

"GoDaddy is a well-known, large, customer-service-driven organization, and so that should diminish the sorts of problems people have experienced," said Paul Levins, ICANN's vice president for corporate affairs.

ICANN already had moved to yank RegisterFly's accreditation and sued the company for its databases. Levins said ICANN would proceed with the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, saying the company still wasn't prominently notifying customers of the decertification decision.

"The RegisterFly situation has been extremely difficult — first and foremost for registrants, as well as for the entire registry and registrar community," said Paul Twomey, ICANN's president and chief executive officer.

"ICANN had been actively seeking participants to act as a transfer provider to bulk transfer RegisterFly records to another accredited registrar," Twomey said. "We have ended that process because the GoDaddy agreement is a better solution for RegisterFly customers, since it's a direct and automatic transfer to a competent and experienced customer-service-oriented organization."

The deal also marks a win for GoDaddy, which potentially can make money when those names are up for renewal.

"If it wasn't for that, our interest in doing the deal would be diminished quite a bit," Parsons said. "It is going to take a certain degree of efforts on our part. We're going to have to answer any questions customers have and resolve any issues."

GoDaddy Group Inc. manages more than 20 million domain names under dot-com, dot-net, dot-org, dot-biz, dot-info, and other suffixesGoDaddy functions as a registrar, registering names on its customers' behalf and submitting them to a central database for each suffix.