How I fought my registered agent over my domain and won

Introduction I wanted to transfer paddinglabs.com out of my registered agent and into Marque, but then I saw something: Their UI asked for a fee This is against ICANN rules, so I contacted their social manager in Bluesky, which told their support team to email me, and they did Their support team doubled down and still asked for a transfer fee, trying to reword it as something else, but their UI clearly said "Transfer fee required" I told them to just give it to me, and they ignored me, so I contacted their upstream registrar and requested the transfer code Eventually, I got the upstream registrar to give me the authInfo code, here are all the emails and conversations: Emails Here's all the contact I had with both Northwest and Domain Registry Northwest websupport@northwestregisteredagent.com Jun 9, 2026, 8:56 AM to me [REDACTED], I understand that you have some questions about your domain name and I'm here to offer some clarification. You currently have a domain name registered with us, which is paddinglabs.com. That domain name is FREE for the life of your registered agent service. If you keep your registered agent service active, we will continue to pay for the domain name renewal each and every year. If you decide that you want to transfer your domain name to a different company, we do charge a $15.99 domain name transfer fee to recover the cost of the free domain name. If you want to use your paddinglabs.com domain name with a website hosting or email service provider other than us, we can do that for free without transferring your domain name. We can point your domain name to your website hosting or email service provider using DNS records that you will receive from the website hosting or email service provider. Once you receive the DNS records from your new website hosting or email service provider, you can email those DNS records directly to us and we will input them for your domain name to point to their website hosting or email service. Please let us know how you'd like to proceed and we can make it happen! Thanks, My response: [redacted] Jun 9, 2026, 10:34 AM to websupport@northwestregisteredagent.com Hey there, I want to ask you to stop complicating things and just send the AuthInfo code Your UI says, and I quote "Transfer Fee Required", and "Domains Requiring Transfer Fees" The AuthInfo code has to be provided on request, can't be gated behind a more restrictive process than changing the nameservers or contact info, and has to be released within 5 calendar days, based on ICANN's Transfer Policy (Section I.A.5) I love your registered agent service, and I really don't want to file a complaint with your upstream registrar or ICANN Just send it. Thank you, [REDACTED] I waited 24 hours, and then assumed Northwest was ignoring me So that's when I emailed Domain Registry (Northwest's domain provider/registrar of record) Domain Registry Jun 10, 2026 Hello, I am the registrant of paddinglabs.com, currently registered through Northwest Register