2001-07-01

12:29:53 PM

• NSI blocking domain name transfers?. This posting to Dave Farber's Interesting People list claims that a recent, unannounced change in Network Solutions' policy has resulted in a slowdown of domain-name transfers away from NSI. This claim is backed up by a position paper from Tucows, a competing registrar (overview; PDF paper):

  Recent unilateral actions by certain ICANN Accredited Registrars to limit [consumers'] rights by creating superfluous transfer procedures for Inter-Registrar transactions are inappropriate, harmful and arbitrary. Justifications to the contrary are thin, illogical and unsupported by fact.

  NSI apparently made the policy change in the first week of June but didn't tell their support reps for at least three weeks after that. The result was that many domain-name transfers -- possibly thousands -- from NSI to another registrar were silently denied, and many domain-name owners chose to re-register with NSI in order to preserve their online presence.