RE: [gnso-irtp-b-jun09] Response from ICANN Compliance re. impact of voluntarily language on 60 day lock

["Rob Golding" <rob.golding@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> clarify the distinction between a Whois update and a change of
> registrant

With regards to domain contacts - registrant, billing, technical, admin ...

It was raised earlier on-list that the process of transferring a domain
between registrars and that of changing the contact details for a domain,
whilst commonly/logically (as far as domain user is concerned) done at the
same time, are different processes and should be treated as such.

For a "thick-whois" system like .org this is trivial - the contact
information is stored at the registry and easily available to the new
registrar, so the process (normally) would be to receive the domain, then to
issue the appropriate instructions to change the contact details.

However for a "thin-whois" system like .com this is not trivial or (with any
level of real accuracy) automatable.

Because the registry does not hold details of who the registrant is
(arguably the most important piece of information after the domain name
itself) the new registrar is (as far as I can tell) forced to attempt to
"scrape" the details from a text dump of the public whois (when its
working), with varying degrees of success.

If IRTP and similar are concerned (as they should be) with hijacks, illegal
transfers, unauthorised contact changes etc - should we be setting down some
rules about contact-retrieval across all TLDs and a definition of *exactly*
what a registrant is and what "powers" over the domain they should have - in
some places they are treated as god, in others they're insignificant and
"admin is king" ...

Rob