ICANN has released their first study in an effort to develop a plan for the failure of a registry. For instance, I have written about the shaky position of the admittedly marginal .travel registry. What would happen if it were to fail? The ICANN report is a first step, identifying the failover mechanisms to be invoked and asking questions about how they may be accomplished.

It's good that they're planning for these things. I'd feel a lot better about it if ICANN had not just completely ignored their own plan for how to handle the failure of a registrar. Perhaps some of the mechanisms they develop for registry failure, such as data escrow, will be useful in developing a registrar failure procedure that they will be willing to follow.