Netcraft: Two RegisterFly Sites Online as Ousted CEO Returns
ICANN is continuing to press RegisterFly to repair its management systems so domain owners can manage their names, but is now dealing directly with company founder Kevin Medina, who has been awarded control of RegisterFly by a New Jersey court. ICANN met Saturday with Medina to demand immediate action on RegisterFly’s failure to provide adequate WHOIS information and make critical transfer codes (known as auth-info codes) available to customers.ICANN’s task would appear to be complicated by the fact that there are currently two RegisterFly web sites running on different infrastructures - RegisterFly.com at The Planet, and Registerfly.net at Sago Networks.
The dueling web sites are the result of a nasty split between Medina and business partner John Naruzewicz, who claimed that he owned 50 percent of RegisterFly and said the company’s board had fired Medina. At the direction of “new CEO” Naruzewicz, the company filed a lawsuit accusing Medina of mismanagement and misuse of company funds. Medina denied all charges, saying he remained the sole owner of RegisterFly. Last Thursday a Newark, N.J. court agreed, awarding sole control of the company to Medina. Naruzewicz indicated that he would not appeal. “We lost and it’s all over,” Naruzewicz told Business Week.
Last Monday, the RegisterFly.com site went offline while Naruzewicz transferred the domain to Tucows and moved the site from Sago Networks (under accounting firm, Hevia, Beagles) to The Planet. The RegisterFly.net site remained online and available at Sago Networks. ICANN has twice notified RegisterFly of breaches of its registrar agreement with ICANN, and threatened the company with loss of accreditation if the breaches were not addressed within 15 days. On Saturday, ICANN reported on its blog that it had met with Medina and insisted on immediate action on several serious problems.
“Presently, the RegisterFly Whois server provides no registrant, administrative contact, technical contact, or other registrar-level Whois data, but instead reports only registry-level data,” ICANN stated. “ICANN has told RegisterFly to correct this problem and report back. The failure by RegisterFly to provide Whois service effectively prohibits all registrants of .com and .net names from transferring out, so this needs to be RegisterFly’s highest priority in order to protect the interests of registrants. This must be corrected immediately.”
ICANN also reported that RegisterFly promised to make it easier for customers who bought resold eNom domains to transfer those names to eNom. ICANN staff is actively monitoring the operation of RegisteFly’s systems and its response to specific transfer problems.
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