On 27 Jan 2016, at 8:45, Thomas Corte wrote:

On 27/01/2016 17:22, Greg Aaron wrote:

So I see three options:
1. Registrar-based WHOIS will always be required, because of expiration date
variances we've been discussing here, caused by auto-renewals and registrar
payment policies.
2. Registrar-based WHOIS goes away. Registry WHOIS contains an Registry
Expiration Date AND a Registrar Expiration Date field. The registrar
populates and manages the latter.
3. Registrar-based WHOIS goes away. The WHOIS only shows the registry
expiration date, and registrars and registrants have to communicate with
each other about expirations and payments etc.

My personal preference would be 3, however (as said before) it seems that
registrant confusion about a domain's fate can best be avoided by option 2.

I would argue that a significant portion of the Registrants reading

…yadda-yadda expiration date: <some date>
…yadda-yadda expiration date: <some other date>

will be a greater source of confusion, possibly causing support tickets that someone will need to address. That, in addition to all the work that having the two fields in the same place will cause. And to note, if dates do not match today, they won’t match after implementation of the proposed extension either. This looks more and more like the wong solution for a non-problem.