Several hundred domain owners will receive a letter from DENIC within the next few weeks. The respective domain owners should read that letter carefully if they do not want to lose their domain name. The recipients of that letter are domain owners of so-called "Transit-Domains". These are domains without valid ISP contract, which are not serviced by a DENIC member. According to the new registrations guidelines of DENIC a direct contract between the domain owner and DENIC has been established through the registration of a domain. If the fees are paid via a DENIC member, everything is fine. However, if DENIC does not receive any payments from there, the administration of the domain is passed on to DENIC and the conditions of DENICdirect are applied. The consequence is that the domain owners now have three options: either they continue not to pay their fees, then the domain name is deleted and can be registered again by someone else. Or the customer switches to a new provider, who takes over the administration of the domain. The third option is to let DENICdirect manage the domain, which currently costs 58 Euro per year.

An example to illustrate this procedure: normally a domain owner has a contract with a provider, which contains in addition to other Internet services also the administration of a domain name. Now, for whatever reason, this contract is cancelled by the provider or the customer. Up to this point the provider has paid the fees to DENIC on behalf of his customer. With the cancellation of the contract this does not happen anymore. Therefore the direct contract between DENIC and the domain owner becomes active and the latter is now obligated to pay the domain fees himself according to the DENICdirect price list.

To inform him about this obligation DENIC sends him a letter, in which the alternatives are also pointed out. If the customer chooses a new provider within four weeks and effects a provider change to this ISP, the direct payment to DENIC becomes unnecessary, because the new provider is now responsible for these payments. The agreement to the provider change is given by the domain owner via a special web page at transit.denic.de, which he accesses with a password known only to him. This password is given in the letter sent by DENIC.

After four weeks the domain owner receives a bill from DENIC, if he hasn't effected a provider change. At the very latest he should now begin to think about the future of his domain name, because, if he doesn't pay this bill, the cancellation of the domain registration contract by DENIC and the deletion of his domain name follow. All domain owners receiving a letter from DENIC should therefore read it carefully and act on time, before they lose their domain name.