Having sponsored the telecast of Sunday’s rain-shortened Indianapolis 500, GoDaddy.com is now racing to the “rescue” of the owners of some 850,000 domain names caught in the tangled affairs of RegisterFly.
Of course, GoDaddy expects to turn a buck in the deal every bit as surely as an Indy racer expects to turn left, but the news nonetheless should be welcomed by RegisterFly victims who until now have had to depend on workarounds conjured up by poker-site bloggers (honestly) in order to get relief.
“For the past few months, they were pretty much in the dark and there was a lot of frustration there,” GoDaddy Chief Executive Bob Parsons tells the Associated Press. “All that is a thing of the past.”
Details from the AP story:
The deal calls for RegisterFly to give GoDaddy its customer databases. Transfers of names will be automatic, and GoDaddy will notify existing RegisterFly customers about the switch and set up a Web page and telephone hotline. GoDaddy expects to start running those names within a week.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organization in charge of the Internet’s addressing policies, said the deal was good for RegisterFly customers.
“GoDaddy is a well-known, large customer-service-driven organization, and so that should diminish the sorts of problems people have experienced,” said Paul Levins, ICANN’s vice president for corporate affairs.
ICANN had swatted RegisterFly back in March with “a formal notice of termination,” a move that necessitated some sort of rescue mission for those users who have been stuck in limbo.
While GoDaddy and Parsons certainly have their critics – those risqué Super Bowl ads don’t play well with everyone; nor will presenting Indy car driver Danica Patrick as “a GoDaddy girl” – I’ve generally found the guy refreshingly candid. Seeing him getting the ICANN stamp of approval is somewhat surprising given the boatloads of grief he’s given that organization over the so-called “add/drop scheme” that keeps so many desirable domain names locked up by speculators.
My guess is that most RegisterFly customers couldn’t care less about any of that stuff.
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