[gnso-rds-pdp-wg] Proposed Agreement for Original Registration Date

[Greg Aaron]

The alternate proposal is a simple marker that says whether there has been a known previous iteration of the domain string, having been registered with a different ROID.

That idea offers even less utility than Original Registration Date.

And it still presents the same operational problem: the registry has to figure out whether a string has existed before.  That is something registries are not designed to do.  And they may not have the necessary historical records.  See the notes below.



All best,

--Greg



From: Greg Aaron
Sent: Wednesday, September 20, 2017 5:44 PM
To: gnso-rds-pdp-wg at icann.org
Subject: RE: Proposed Agreement for Original Registration Date

My comments:

Is it worth including Original Registration Date in the RDS and its output?  Is it an acceptably high priority?
No.  There are many, many things that an RDS system can conceivably do, but not all are worth doing.  The argument for inclusion is “it might be useful to a limited number of specialty users,” which is not compelling.  It is a “nice-to-have”, a bell-and-whistle that overloads RDS output.  If we are to publish the Original Create Date, why not also publish all the string’s Create Dates between original and now, and all of the domain’s previous Registrants?  Those things would also be useful to certain users, but IMHO they are not worth doing.

Is Original Registration Date potentially confusing?
Yes.  Can we expect that users (such as registrants) will know the difference between the Original Registration Date and the  Create Date?   It is better to show one Create date rather than two.  In this case we should choose simplicity over complexity.

Is Original Registration Date practical to implement?  It is even possible?
No, there are several practical problems.

  1.  This data must come from the domain registry.  And a domain registry not the same as a data warehouse.  A domain registry’s database usually does not contain a record of every Create transaction ever made in the registry.  This is vital for the WG members to understand.
  2.  Instead, a domain registry tends to contain records for the currently registered domains (only).  Deleted records (such as expired and then purged domains) are often not stored in the active registry database, for performance reasons.  Instead, these historical records might be in a data warehouse or on a backup disk somewhere. That is, if they are kept somewhere at all.  Registries are not required to save those old records in perpetuity.
  3.  So Original Create Date may not even be available for most of the domains currently in the gTLD registries.   This reduces the value of the Original Registration Date idea considerably.
  4.  Original Create Date may be incompatible with the SLA requirements in the registry contracts.  When a domain is created in a registry, the registry operator will have to then retrieve the Original Create date and put that into the active RDS record.  But again, that’s data’s probably stored somewhere other than the registry, and the retrieval process may be slow, if it is even possible.  And creating domains is required to be a high-speed, high-availability operation.  The entire registry-registrar paradigm is predicated on that, based on business needs and designed into the technology.  Doing a historical hunt for and population of this data sounds like a nightmare for registry operators to perform.

Can users get along without Original Registration Date?  Can these users get what they need elsewhere?
Users have gotten along without Original Registration Date in WHOIS for the last twenty years.  That is an argument against future inclusion.  There are services that provide domain histories for the  purposes (domain name purchase or sale, etc.).

One of the justifications in the draft was “domain name control”.  That is irrelevant.  Original Registration Date provides no data about the current iteration/lifetime of the domain.  And one can’t control a version of a domain that no longer exists.

Ideas like Original Registration Date start to turn registries into things they were not designed to be.  Domain registries have certain well-designed goals and functions.  Being historical data warehouses is not one of them.

All best,
--Greg



From: gnso-rds-pdp-wg-bounces at icann.org<mailto:gnso-rds-pdp-wg-bounces at icann.org> [mailto:gnso-rds-pdp-wg-bounces at icann.org] On Behalf Of Amr Elsadr
Sent: Wednesday, September 20, 2017 4:07 PM
To: gnso-rds-pdp-wg at icann.org<mailto:gnso-rds-pdp-wg at icann.org>
Subject: [gnso-rds-pdp-wg] Proposed Agreement for Original Registration Date

Dear Working Group Members,

In follow-up to an action item from the 29 August WG call in which the 22 August poll results<https://community.icann.org/display/gTLDRDS/2017-08-29+Next+Gen+RDS+PDP+Working+Group?preview=/66086750/69279984/SummaryResults-Poll-from-22AugustCall.pdf> were discussed, a drafting team was formed to assist with proposing an alternative WG agreement regarding “Original Registration Date” to help the WG discuss and reach rough consensus with respect to this data element.

On today’s WG call, a proposed agreement on the data element regarding Original Registration Date was presented by one of the members (Andrew Sullivan) of the drafting team that had been deliberating on it. In follow-up to the action item from today’s call: “Staff to distribute drafting team output on Original Registration Date to WG mailing list; all WG members invited to review and comment”, all WG members are now invited to review and comment on the drafting team’s proposal.

The proposal, as well as the recording of today’s call, were posted on today’s meeting wiki page here: https://community.icann.org/x/ZGfwAw

Direct links to the proposal in MS Word<https://community.icann.org/display/gTLDRDS/2017-09-20+Next+Gen+RDS+PDP+Working+Group?preview=/66086756/69284003/Volunteer%20Team%20on%20Action%20Item%20regarding%20Original%20Registration%20Date%20-%2018%20Sep%20Update.docx> and pdf<https://community.icann.org/display/gTLDRDS/2017-09-20+Next+Gen+RDS+PDP+Working+Group?preview=/66086756/69284004/Volunteer%20Team%20on%20Action%20Item%20regarding%20Original%20Registration%20Date%20-%2018%20Sep%20Update.pdf> formats are also available.

Thanks.

Amr


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