From time to time, I get a damned good e-mail that I have to share. This one from Phil asks a question that I thought was well worth looking into:

Hi Mitch, great podcast I try to download each show weekly. I was bitten by the RegisterFly.com problems a while back and today while browsing to their web site it looks like they are still in business? How can this be?

RegisterFly’s demise as an ICANN accredited register was one of the biggest hosting stories of last year. These days you don’t hear much about it though. Technically, yes – they are and can still be in business.

Look Back at the RegisterFly Mess

Back inn 2007, ICANN launched an investigation of RegisterFly since there were a lot of allegations they were sticking it to the customer. With other issues and lawsuits that followed, the RegisterFly co-owners Kevin Medina and John Naruszewicz had a breakup of their own. The road was rocky, the public was mad and then it was made known by an unsealed class action lawsuit that there were claims RegisterFly defrauded customers trying to register or renew domain names.

According to Wikipedia, one of the early lawsuits within RegisterFly was pretty hilarious.

Meanwhile RegisterFly filed suit against Kevin Medina, alleging he had stolen company funds for a $27,000 escort service, a $6,000 liposuction procedure, a $10,000/month penthouse apartment in Miami, Florida and a $6,000 chihuahua dog.

March 31, 2007 was the date that ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) removed RegisterFly’s ICANN accreditation and told them to take the ICANN logo off of their web site. Skipping ahead though the legal mumbo-jumbo they could no longer act as a domain name register themselves and had to give up the domain name registrations they had done to ICANN. GoDaddy and other companies stood up and offered the RegisterFly refugees a home for their domains and that pretty much catches us up to the present date and time.

So Why is RegisterFly Still Around?

Well, this message from Robert O’Neal, Chief Executive Officer for RegisterFly should give you a candy coated reason:

We are an authorized reseller of domain names, the same as we have been for 6 years prior, this has not changed. We are NOT OUT OF BUSINESS as the message may imply to some.

So they can’t act as a domain name register themselves, like a GoDaddy can but they can resell domain names to you, like many web hosts do out there though a reseller service. This is how they did business before becoming an accredited register. So technically they are no longer a domain name register, they are just reselling somebody else’s registration services to you.