Thanks Alan and Danny for outlining the issues so well. I think it's critical to protecting registrants' interests that ICANN and registrars give them adequate information and understandable choices about domain registration. Experience now shows that standardizing application of the RGP would be good policy. --Wendy Alan Greenberg wrote:
Four weeks ago, Danny Younger raised the issue of the Redemption Grace Period (RGP) with the North American RALO. A copy of his e-mail can be found at https://st.icann.org/alac/index.cgi?redemption_grace_period_danny_younger.
In essence, about six years ago, the RGP was proposed and implemented to allow a registrant to recover a domain name after it had expired and been deleted by the registrar. The reason for the deletion could be that a registrant did not receive the required notices of expiry, or they were not sent, or they simply forgot. Under the RGP, when a registry (such as VeriSign for .com) receives a request to delete a name, it is put in a hold status for 30 days. During this period, the name does not resolve, and if nothing else had caught the registrant's eye before, this usually will. During this time, a registrant can recover the name for a fee. The fee is currently set $40 but can and generally is marked up by the registrar.
The RGP was implemented voluntarily as a Registry Service by all of the non-sponsored gTLDs. A registrar is not required to offer the RGP however, so the existence of this registry service did not guarantee that a registrant who neglected to renew could effectively use the RGP. It was hoped that as Registrar contracts were renegotiated, the requirement to make the RGP available would be added, but this did not happen. A consensus policy could have been created which would force them to offer the service, but this also did not happen.
From the point of registries, domains automatically renew, but the registrar can reverse this retroactively during the "auto-renew grace period" (ARGP - typically 45 days).
Since that time the situation has changed in that registrars have generally added conditions in their registrant agreements that give the registrar the right to transfer or sell or auction an expired domain to some other party (the so called "direct transfer" right). Often, during the AGRP, they may monetize the domain temporarily to see if it attracts much traffic and therefore has commercial value. During this time, they *may* be willing to sell the domain back to the original registrant. The price may depend on how much traffic they saw in the interim. Once a value is determined, the domain may be kept by the registrar (perhaps via a related company), or sold or auctioned. Since the domain is never actually deleted at the registry (it still maintains its original creation date), it never gets a chance to enter the RGP.
As complicated as this may sound, it is the short version. There was an excellent tutorial on these practices given at the Lisbon ICANN meeting in March 2007. A transcript can be found at http://www.icann.org/en/meetings/lisbon/transcript-tutorial-expiring-25mar07....
The NARALO has agreed that this is a good project to take on, and has requested that the ALAC pursue it. The issue was on the ALAC meeting agenda of September 9, but unfortunately time ran out before we got to it. However, since that meeting there have been a number of conversations that indicate that this is an issue of importance and that there is sufficient interest among At-Large that ALAC should pursue it.
In summary, we are looking for a way to ensure that registrants have a reasonably and fairly priced way to retain a domain name, even if it had inadvertently expired in the recent past. We are essentially looking at it from two main perspectives:
- Impact on registrants who lose control of their domain name, potentially with significant financial or other impact; and - Impact on users who can no longer access web sites and services that they rely on.
If we an find sufficient interest in At-Large and the RALOs to support this project, I would like to see the ALAC request an Issues Report from ICANN staff, which is the first step in initiating a Policy Development Process (PDP). Following the delivery of the Issues report, the GNSO Council would need to vote to decide to initiate a PDP. Informal conversations indicate there may be reasonable support for this on Council; assuming ICANN staff decide that this is an issues within the scope of the GNSO, initiation requires only a >33% vote.
If we work quickly, I believe we can formally decide to proceed at the ALAC's October 14th meeting, and issue the request for the Issues Report in Cairo.
I solicit general statements of support from ALSs and RALOs, and a few volunteers to help work on the request. Volunteers must either be knowledgeable in the issues being discussed, or be willing to learn very quickly.
Alan
PS For this who want to understand more of the history of the RGP, you can refer to: http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/redemption-proposal-14feb02.htm http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/redemption-supplement-20feb02.htm http://www.icann.org/en/meetings/accra/redemption-topic.htm http://www.icann.org/en/minutes/prelim-report-14mar02.htm#RedemptionGracePer...
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-- Wendy Seltzer -- wendy@seltzer.org Visiting Professor, American University Washington College of Law Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/seltzer.html http://www.chillingeffects.org/ https://www.torproject.org/