Come to Daddy: RegisterFly-by-Night Victims Find a New Home

Another internet first--a bad one, the collapse of a privately owned domain-name registrar--may finally be moving toward a resolution.

GoDaddy.com, an internet domain-name registrar known best for its raunchy Super Bowl ads, agreed today to take on hundreds of thousands of customers left stranded when a rival registrar collapsed and was stripped of its accreditation in March.

Former customers of the failed company, RegisterFly, have been unable to renew, transfer--or, in some cases, use--their internet domain names for months as the company's service deteriorated and its founders sued each other in federal court, accusing one another of fraud.

GoDaddy's rescue of the stranded customers was brokered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a public-private group responsible for coordinating internet domain names and internet protocol addresses. Icann, as the group is known, announced the pact this morning.

The agreement requires RegisterFly to give its customer databases to GoDaddy and complete the transfer within a week. Financial terms were not disclosed.

GoDaddy, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, says it is the world's largest domain name registrar, with 20.3 million internet addresses ending in .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, and other suffixes.

by Mark Stein