I am delighted to report that NeuStar has submitted a request to ICANN to allow them to modify the Add Grace Period by reducing the number of deletes that a registrar can do for free on its .biz domain. The introduction to the request reads as follows:

TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION OF THE PROPOSED SERVICE: Currently there are no limitations on the number of deletions that a registrar can process during the five-day AGP. The proposed service would limit the number of AGP deletions where a registrar could receive a full registration fee credit. This limit would be determined each month, with a maximum of 50 per month or 10% of that registrar?s net new monthly domain name registrations, whichever is greater. There would be no change to the current registry interface.  A registrar would be permitted to delete as many names as it wished during the five-day AGP, receiving credit throughout the month. However, at the end of the NeuStar's normal monthly billing cycle the Registrar?s account would be debited for the full value of the domain name registrations that exceeded the month's set threshold. It is expected that Afilias will be submitting a similar request for .info.

The process to get this done started in a small work-group at the San Juan ICANN meeting. Although we had hoped that it would happen much sooner, it is great that it has now been done and can impact the discussions in Delhi.

The full text of the request can be found attached to http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/council/msg04586.html .

Alan