November 11, 2004

123-reg raises ICANN fears

by brian_turner

123-reg today issued an e-mail to all existing customers warning, of imminent changes by ICANN.

Owned by Pipex Communications, and currently a major registrar of UK domains, 123-reg raises fears that the increased ease of transfer of UK domains between registrars will compromise ownship rights.

For example, if you do not respond to a transfer request of your domain name with 5 days, the domain transfer will occur by default.

Obviously, this raises the spectre of simply issuing transfer notices on UK domains where the owners are known to be away from the office for a few days.

Even worse, there is always the danger of any number of junk and spam filters for e-mail actually tagging the transfer notice as spam.

In other words, ICANN is in very danger of having set up a way in which UK domains can be too easily removed from the rightful owner.

123-reg state their intention to automatically lock all domains unless the user specifically unlocks them for nameserver changes. It’ll be interesting to see how this affects not simply domain ownership, but also general user ability and ease in which domains are managed.

Discussion of this continues in the forums:
UK domains: ICANN changes

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