[gtld-tech] Registrar Expiration Date I-D

[Thomas Corte]

Hi all,

On 22/01/2016 07:40, Francisco Obispo wrote:

> ...
>     Or a note on the registrar whois explaining that the expiry date
>     denotes the expiration date of the service.

My hope was that moving all registries to a thick Whois model would
ultimately eliminate the need for a registrar Whois altogether. And with
this goal in mind, it's actually an interesting idea to include the
registrar's expiration date in the registry's Whois output.

While, from a purist's standpoint, it seems entirely out of scope for
registries, it does account for the fact that the end of the registrant's
paid service period with the *registrar* is pretty much the *only* date
the registrant needs to know. Assuming that most registries perform
auto-renews of domain names at their registry expiration date anyway,
what a registrant really needs to be concerned about is that the
registrar won't delete the domain at the end of the service term, as
denoted by the registrar expiration date. And it's true that in many
cases, that date may be far off the registry expiration date.

Given that most domains are sold by resellers, or resellers of resellers,
it could in fact even be beneficial to include the expiration dates of
the entire reseller chain, too... ultimately, it's the reseller on top of
the chain that will initiate the deletion of the domain when he's no
longer paid. In this respect, the extension isn't going quite far enough
to deal with this problem.

As a side note, it's interesting that ICANN, by adopting this extension,
is finally paying attention to the fact that the registry expiration date
is not all that important when it comes to keeping or losing a domain
name. Unfortunately, this was completely overlooked when the Expired
Registration Recovery Policy (ERRP) was introduced, where pointlessly
only the registry expiration date was focused on.

Looking at the extension itself, I wonder whether the date will be
optional or mandatory to set. It seems that, once it's set on a domain,
there is no way to remove it.

Best regards,

Thomas

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