What happens to the domains when ICANN fires a registrar?

Somewhere this month, a business owner typed their domain into a browser and got the site, as usual. Then they saw a headline saying their registrar has lost its accreditation. Both things are true. The company that sold you the domain can lose its accreditation, and the domain is not supposed to go with it.

The company in question is Fewmoretaps OU, trading as Trustname.com. On August 27, 2026, ICANN sent it a notice of termination, and the termination took effect on September 11. The same notice says ICANN will follow its De-Accredited Registrar Transition Procedure to move the domains Trustname managed to a qualified accredited registrar. So this isn’t a “your domain vanished” story. It’s a “your control path just changed, and nobody asked you” story. Those need a checklist, not a panic.

Why ICANN terminated Trustname’s accreditation

Trustname lost its accreditation over failures to handle DNS abuse. ICANN’s notice cites two uncured breaches of the registrar agreement: failing to act promptly against DNS abuse on domains it sponsored, and failing to investigate and respond to abuse reports in a reasonable time. The reports that triggered the June notice involved domains impersonating banks and a government tax agency, and by ICANN’s account, Trustname took weeks to act on them, and then only after the compliance team stepped in. The registrar later admitted its own standard was wrong: it had demanded proof that credentials were actually stolen before it would call a site phishing.

No single case did it. ICANN sent four breach notices in 78 days: June 10, June 26, July 16, and August 26. Its Domain Metrica data showed the median share of Trustname’s domains reported for phishing rising from about 0.7 percent in January to about 10 percent by August, a figure that kept climbing through two remediation plans. One day after the fourth notice, ICANN sent the termination letter.

The registrar had marketed itself to customers who expected abuse complaints. Domain Name Wire reported that its site once promised to be a “bulletproof” registrar for businesses in sensitive niches. It wasn’t. How many domains are caught up in this is unclear: the notice doesn’t say, and the same report found about 4,000 .com names in Verisign’s data against a website claiming millions of domain owners. If you registered anything there, the count doesn’t matter. Yours is one of them.

What does not happen to the domain

A registrar is the company that manages your registration with the registry that runs the extension. It doesn’t own the domain. When ICANN terminates a registrar’s agreement, the registration still exists at the registry. What changes is which company can manage it.

ICANN’s own page on terminations states the rule plainly: any names formerly sponsored by the terminated registrar must be transferred to an ICANN-accredited registrar. The procedure for doing that is the one named in the Trustname notice. Its stated purpose is to protect registrants. In practice, it means a bulk transfer: every affected name moves to a gaining registrar that ICANN selects or approves.

Your existing nameserver settings generally remain in place, but DNS hosting and its records do not automatically move with the registration. The site and email should keep working if the existing DNS hosting and related services remain operational. That’s the normal case, not a guarantee, which is why the checklist below includes DNS.

The new registrar may be one you never chose

Here is the part that catches people: you chose your original registrar, but a bulk transfer can put your domain in the hands of a company you didn’t choose. ICANN’s bulk-transfer page says former customers should receive a notice of the transfer and instructions for managing their names from the gaining registrar. That notice is what you’re waiting for. Expect a new account, a new login, an identity check, and a card on file with a business you’ve never dealt with.

What if nothing arrives? ICANN’s answer is to look up the gaining registrar’s contact details through Internic and get in touch directly, then contact ICANN if the registrar doesn’t respond. ICANN’s bulk-transfer list now names Atak Domain Bilgi Teknolojileri A.Ş. (IANA 1601) as the gaining registrar for Trustname. The listed September 11 date is the termination date, not the date the bulk transfer was completed. Don’t wait for it to find you.

Make sure the transfer notice can reach you

The notice goes to the contact details on the registration. Trustname says most of its domains use its privacy/proxy contact details, so notices may initially reach Trustname, which says it will forward them to customers’ account emails. Check that account email as well as the underlying registration contact details. If those point to a former employee’s inbox, a defunct agency or the address you used in 2019, the most important message about your domain this year is going somewhere you can’t see.

ICANN’s registrant contact page sets out the obligation: give the registrar accurate contact details and update them promptly when they change. Registrars send a reminder at least once a year under the Registration Data Reminder Policy (RDRP). It’s the email most people delete. Wrong or stale information can get a registration suspended or canceled. So can ignoring a registrar’s inquiry about accuracy. And ICANN doesn’t update contact details; only the registrar can.

I wrote recently about who gets the domain when a business partnership ends. The layers I separated there, including the registered holder, the registrar account, and the DNS, are the same ones a termination tests. A stale email isn’t a legal problem. It’s an admin problem, right up until the week a transfer notice bounces.

Check the boring things before they become urgent

None of what follows needs a lawyer or a technician. It needs an afternoon and the table below.

Two of those rows matter most. The contact email decides whether you hear about the transfer at all, and the expiration date decides whether the domain survives the gap.

Watch for fake renewal and transfer notices

A forced registrar move is a gift to anyone sending fake domain emails. The real notice says a company you’ve never heard of now manages your domain and needs you to log in. The fake one says exactly the same thing, with a button.

So treat every message about the transfer as unverified until you’ve checked it from the outside. Every one. Find the gaining registrar through ICANN’s bulk-transfer page or Internic, not through the email. Type its address into the browser rather than clicking. Check the domain’s registrar and expiration information through RDAP, and verify private account details directly with the registrar. And don’t pay for anything until you’re inside an account you reached on your own. Not a renewal, not a “transfer fee”, not a listing. The bulk transfer itself costs registrants nothing, so an invoice for it is a tell.

You may not be able to move again immediately

Plenty of readers will want to leave the gaining registrar the day they arrive. ICANN’s bulk-transfer page allows for it, with a catch. The gaining registrar may deny outbound transfers for the first 60 days, at its discretion, under the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy. ICANN describes the window as a registrant protection. If imposed, that restriction means two months with a company you didn’t choose, whether you like it or not.

The renewal timing is the sharper edge. The bulk transfer doesn’t extend the registration term by a year. If the gaining registrar imposes that restriction, a domain expiring inside those 60 days may need to be renewed with it before you can transfer elsewhere. Check the expiration dates first. Then decide about transferring.

Decide later whether the new registrar has earned the domain

Once the dust settles, judge the new registrar the way you’d judge any registrar. The shock of the move is not a criterion, and the resentment of not having chosen it is a poor one. The questions are the ordinary ones: whether it’s accredited and support answers in a time you can live with, and whether renewal prices and dates are visible in the account before the card is charged. Then the security set, which matters more after a forced move than before it: a registrar lock, two-factor authentication, a clear path to the auth code when you want to leave, and DNS management where you need it.

If the new registrar meets those needs, staying is a reasonable choice. Transfer again if another registrar offers something better, not simply because you didn’t choose this one. The ordinary reasons to transfer a domain apply once any applicable 60-day restriction ends. Knowing how to unlock your domain, retrieve its auth code, and access the contact email you updated earlier will help you manage that transfer without another crisis.

Make the domain survivable before the next surprise

Trustname’s customers didn’t do anything wrong. They registered a domain and got on with running a business, which is what domains are for. What the termination exposed is how many things have to line up for a domain to survive a change nobody planned. A current contact email. A login somebody in the business can find. A lock, two-factor, a renewal date someone is watching, and a copy of the DNS. I’ve argued before that “boring” settings prevent most domain hijacking. A registrar losing its accreditation is the same lesson from the other side.

Pick a date once a year and check those six. It’s an hour, not a project. The alternative is learning which one was stale from a notice you never received.