I’m pleased to report on the successful conclusion of two registrar outreach sessions in Los Angeles, USA and Xiamen, China. Representatives of the registrars’ Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) negotiating team and I, along with a small handful of ICANN staff members, spent a day and half in each city answering questions and helping educate registrars about the new provisions in the 2013 RAA and new consensus policies.
The new RAA contains several important changes intended to promote a strong, healthy domain name space and help registrants make informed decisions when purchasing services from registrars. Realizing that these changes might require significant implementation efforts, registrars and other community members called on ICANN to conduct a proactive program to help registrars understand their new obligations and discuss needs required for compliance with the new agreement. These outreach sessions — the first of four currently planned — focused largely on the operational impact of the new agreement and offered registrars a platform to collectively solve complex challenges.
Some of the key topics at our outreach sessions included:
- dealings with resellers
- new Whois obligations
- abuse complaint handling
- data retention requirements (and the procedure for requesting a waiver)
- new consensus policies
Our outreach sessions in Los Angeles and Xiamen were well attended and seem to have been well-received. Close to 40 registrar representatives attended the Los Angeles session in-person, with another 20 or so participating remotely. Sixty registrar representatives from China, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan attended the event in Xiamen. (Real-time Chinese-English / English-Chinese translation services were provided.) Our next session will be held in Berlin, Germany next week.
Thanks go to all of the dozens of registrars who have attended or plan to attend these meetings, with special thanks to James Bladel (GoDaddy), Jeff Eckhaus (eNom), and Matt Serlin (MarkMonitor), who each participated in one or both of the sessions on behalf of the registrars’ RAA negotiating team.
The presentation materials from the first meeting are available here:
- 2013 RAA Registrar Training Overview [PDF, 227 KB]
- Reseller Obligations [PDF, 173 KB]
- Privacy Proxy and Disclosure and Abuse Requirements [PDF, 190 KB]
- Data Retention [PDF, 235 KB]
- Compliance Presentation [PDF, 276 KB]
- New Whois Obligations [PDF, 239 KB]
- Consensus Policy Implementation Update [PDF, 211 KB]
- GNSO Update [PDF, 1.52 MB]
- TMCH [PDF, 347 KB]
- URS [PDF, 233 KB]