[gtld-tech] Registrar Expiration Date I-D

[Luis E. Muñoz]

On 22 Jan 2016, at 2:35, Thomas Corte wrote:

> 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.

I see things a bit differently.

The issue at hand is that in essence, we have two completely separate 
databases tracking the same object (the domain name) using (hopefully) 
the same rules to ascertain its life-cycle and expose it to the public, 
including the registrant.

IMO, the two databases operate in rough agreement most of the time 
regarding the expiry date. Disagreement usually happens around the 
auto-renew date because the two databases might very well update their 
status at different times creating a window of inconsistency.

Nowadays, registrants go to either the registrar or the registry to 
consult the expiration date — I would think that most go to the 
registrar, where they’re seeing the “Registrar Expiration Date” 
and probably leave happy knowing their domain is safe and sound for the 
year they just were charged for.

The proposal calls for the registrar to send their version of the 
expiration date so that the registry displays it. Of course, the update 
itself will have some time delay in being processed — besides of being 
an additional transformative operation, that will be coming at a time 
separate from the moment the registry finishes processing the automatic 
renewal. Basically we’re left in a worst place than we started. By 
exposing both dates at the same place, all of a sudden the registrant is 
made aware of a non-issue that she can do nothing about. This will 
result in more tickets opened at both, registrars and registries, 
claiming that the dates are different as well as unnecessary stress on 
the registrants. The resolution of those tickets will likely be some 
variation of “just wait a little and the dates will again magically 
match. Thank you”, causing the impression that there is some sort of 
confusion in the way the domain name is being managed by the registrar / 
registry.

The inconsistency is a problem we have *today*, and by all means it 
self-corrects. It’s a classical distributed systems problem with no 
easy / perfect solution, by the way, simply because of the model we have 
in place. Why do we want to expose and amplify the impact of this 
non-issue by including third parties that cannot do anything to help 
resolve the situation?

Again IMO, this does not improve things. We’re making an already 
complex system, more complex while at the same time we all lose.

Luis Muñoz
Director, Registry Operations
____________________________

http://www.uniregistry.link/
2161 San Joaquin Hills Road
Newport Beach, CA 92660

Office +1 949 706 2300 x 4242
lem at uniregistry.link
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