ICANN can't take care of everything.
Over on CircleID, Bruce Young tells a story of an Internet user who gets into trouble because "his" domain name was registered in the name of a webhosting provider that went bankrupt later on.
He demands that ICANN should put in place safeguards which would prevent this from happening. In particular, Young suggests that customers should not just be able to transfer domain names between registrars, but also between "virtual hosts"; that ICANN establish rules to protect customers of such corporations in the event of business failure, up to the content stored there; and that ICANN mandate that when an intermediate company registers a domain on behalf of a customer, the domain record's administrative contact, as a minimum, must reflect the customer, not the company acting on the customer's behalf.
As far as registrars are concerned, ICANN is currently doing its homework on domain name portability.
As far as web hosting companies are concerned, though, these suggestions only look appealing at first sight. Upon closer inspection, they wouldn't be good policy.
