ICANN Vice President Paul Levins said the rules governing domain registrars needed to be updated because they were written at a time when there were few firms offering the service. According to an ICANN figure, more than 800 companies now offer domain registration services.
ICANN said it would consider requiring potential registrar operators to prove a basic level of skill. ICANN also is considering a rule mandating that the agency give approval to any changes in a registrar company’s ownership.
ICANN also said it plans to explore the idea of creating contractual tools short of revoking a registrar’s license to insure compliance. Other questions raised by the recent demise of RegisterFly are whether ICANN should tolerate anonymous domain registrations and whether the agency should keep a data repository in case of another problem reminiscent of RegisterFly.
But ICANN CEO Paul Twomey said the new rules would not come at the expense of fostering a competitive registration system that gives consumers a wide range of choices.
ICANN plans to discuss making changes to the domain registrar’s agreement at its meeting this week in Lisbon.
Earlier this month, ICANN terminated RegisterFly’s accreditation after an internal ownership dispute lead to a barrage of customer complaints. While ICANN was able to force RegisterFly to turn over some of the domain data, it was unable to preserve all of the company’s records because some were kept anonymously.
Levins said ICANN is considering a lawsuit against RegisterFly because of the fiasco.
RegisterFly has until the end of March to appeal ICANN’s decision to revoke its accreditation, Levins said.
Justin Kulhawick, who runs the RegisterFlies.com site critical of RegisterFly, praised ICANN for the broader review but said the agency should have acted on complaints about the company long ago.
