The company’s eight-month-old subsidiary Rebel.com yesterday launched MyRebel.com, which lets so-called domainers interact directly with the domain registries, without having to go through a registrar middleman like Go Daddy or Register.com.

Rebel believes domainers are frightened of losing their domains through the actions of corrupt and/or incompetent registrars such as the recently deceased RegisterFly, or through the actions of legitimate registrars deleting registrations after receiving complaints.

RegisterFly collapsed after allegations of executive fraud and hundreds of complaints about domains being lost or stolen. And there was a well-publicised incident in February when Go Daddy cancelled FamilyAlbum.com, a very valuable domain, over a reported policy violation.

People would like to own their own registrar so they don’t stand the risk of losing their domains through the policies or business practices of a registrar, Rebel.com chief executive Dave Chisell told us.

With MyRebel, the registrar middleman is, to a certain extent, removed, and their names are now being controlled by them, rather than a customer service agent acting on a registrar’s policy, Chisell said.

Customers will get a web interface that they can use to directly add, delete and update their registrations with the com/net and org/info registries run by VeriSign and Afilias respectively. This way, nobody but the customer can delete a domain, Chisell said.

The service has been designed for a relatively small number of people – individual domainers with portfolios of more than 10,000 domains. Due to the way the domain name registration system works, there are also a limited number of slots available for would-be users, according to Chisell.

To electronically interact directly with a registry like VeriSign, a company needs to have an accreditation from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. This involves a lot of paperwork and systems design, as well as up-front and ongoing fees and costs.

MyRebel intends to cut through this barrier to entry by leasing out its own ICANN accreditations to its customers. Each accreditation entitles the owner to a a business relationship with the registry companies and a fixed number of simultaneous connections to the registry’s servers.

Momentous.ca owns about 100 accredited registrars, essentially paper companies used by its Pool.com subsidiary to rapidly re-register expiring domains. MyRebel.com would see Momentous share these accreditations with its high-volume domainer customers.

The company is launching the new services at the Traffic conference in New York this week, which is expected to be attended by about 500 domainers. Due to the supply/demand situation, prices for MyRebel are expected to be negotiable.

Chisell said that MyRebel will require its customers to agree to the terms of the standard ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement, which would still require them, for example, to provide valid contact information in the Whois database.

Rebel will also likely turn away potential customers that have large portfolios of typo-squatted domains, which could attract unwelcome legal attention.

With these two facts in mind, the potential for abuse of the system may be more limited than it otherwise appeared on the surface.