Domain name registrar Namecheap is big, but until this year it didn’t show up on charts that rank registrars by domains. That’s because Namecheap acted as an Enom reseller, so it added to Enom’s numbers rather than its own.
Namecheap wants to transfer four million domains that Verisign offers (e.g. .Com, .net) that were registered at Namecheap while it was an Enom reseller from Enom’s accreditations to its own accreditations. In a lawsuit filed in Seattle this week (pdf), Namecheap alleges that Tucows, which acquired Enom earlier this year, is thwarting the effort.
Read MoreNamecheap also claims that Tucows is concerned that the mass transfer of domains “would wreak such havoc and confusion” because of the volume and because .com is a thin Whois in which registrant data stays with the registrar, not the registry...