Nominet Consultation: Raising Industry Standards

Nominet is running a public consultation on "Raising Industry Standards" -
http://www.nominet.org.uk/news/latest/?contentId=2737

It discusses and number of possible changes to the tag holder's agreement and Nominet's relationship with tag holders (which it calls registrars).

To quote:
"If you are a registrar we would like your comments on our proposals to strengthen the registrar contract and the support we are offering to help you comply. In particular we value your opinion on the following:
• Proposals to strengthen our contract with you, introducing achievable standards on good practice, data accuracy, technical and business competence, and publication of information about charges and service levels.
• Whether you would like us to introduce a “gold standard” for registrars.
• Whether you would support our working with other industry players in the wider Internet community to coordinate voluntary codes of practice.
There is no intention to impose a bureaucratic or expensive system on would-be registrars, nor to benefit one segment of registrars or one business model over others.

If you are a registrant we would especially like your comments on the changes we propose to make to the registrar and registrant contracts. In particular:
• Whether our proposals about strengthening our contract with registrars would enhance your trust and confidence in the .uk domain.
• Whether you would find a “gold standard” useful in choosing between .uk registrars.
• Whether you would support us in working with other industry players in the wider Internet community to coordinate voluntary codes of practice.

Whether you are a registrar, registrant or simply someone with an interest in how standards in the Internet industry can be improved, we welcome your opinions and hope you will help us by responding to this consultation."

The consultation period runs from 31 January 2006 to 30 April 2006. Responses to standards-consultation@nominet.org.uk with the subject header 'standards consultation'.

 

'gold standard'- in what sense please?

 

Read the docs?

 

I started drafting a response not long after the consultation document was published. One thing that I feel I should point outfrom the bottom of Page 2, is:

"In this paper those who register domain names on behalf of end users are referred to as registrars. The proposals in the paper are only relevant to those registrars that offer domain name registrations to third parties, whether end users or resellers."

That probably excludes a substantial number of those that populate this forum.

Page 10, Section 11.1, of the PDF mentions "A gold standard". A previous document with the filename IndustryStandsConsult.doc also discussed the idea of a gold standard in more detail. The former document included more incentives to support a gold standard than the current PDF. One of those incentives was the possibility of gold standard "registrars" being allowed to effect a registrant change. Why has this incentive been removed from the current consultation document?

I am sure that many tag holders that register domain names either for themselves or for a limited number of third parties, and are involved in drop catching, would really like to be able to make registrant changes via the automaton rather than doing it via the current paper based route. Could this facility, which was mentioned in the original document, become a reality if enough people wanted it and supported it, once this exercise has been completed, or has the idea of registrars being able to do this as a result of a future gold standard been rejected by Nominet's Legal and Management?

 

See paragraph 11 of the consultation.

 

I've had a word with my colleagues who wrote the paper. The original purpose of this footnote was to emphasise that the paper is primarily about improving the way that tag holders deal with their customers. However, I agree that it is probably going a bit far to say that it will not apply to anyone else at all, and so I will suggest to them that we amend that wording to encourage more people to respond.

The need to move away from the current process for transfers is extremely well recognised and has been for some time. As has been mentioned before here and elsewhere Nominet is underdoing a major series of technical reforms, which are ongoing. One of the next steps will be the data restructure and the move to EPP - both significant projects. Also during the year better online systems are due and these will, we hope, include a fully online system (subject to some online oversight here, obviously) for registrants to do online transfers - with online transfers being much easier for our systems to handle once we have the data restructure sorted out. This is the subject of a great deal of progamming work here at the moment and a lot of hard work by technical - but I'll leave it to Jay to explain in more detail if he wishes.

Once online transfers are in place, there will doubtless be a fee review to determine whether the current level of fees should be maintained with this new scheme, or whether it can be reduced. I can't second guess that at this stage (and anyway, I don't decide it), and I can't remember why that particular edit was made to the paper (its been in development some time now) but it is likely that we did not want to confuse the issue by mentioning this.

Certainly, if this is something of importance to you, please do mention it in any consultation response you submit - the whole point of the exercise is to get your opinions, whatever they may be. As I say, technical developments may make these requests obsolete, but it is certainly worth flagging your interest.

 

That will be interesting to see