[gtld-tech] Registrar Expiration Date I-D

[Thomas Corte]

Hello Luis,

On 22/01/2016 18:18, Luis E. Muñoz wrote:

> 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.

It's not just a matter of how auto-renewals are processed; the agreement
highly depends on the registrar's billing policy.

As an example, our own registrar system usually starts a 2-year payment
cycle for a domain on the day the domain enters our system. For a newly
created domain, this means that the expiration dates will be identical.

However, for transferred-in domains it could be vastly different.
Let's say a domain is created by a different registrar on January 1st,
2016 with a 1-year period (expiring on 2017-01-01). It is then
transferred to us on July 1st, 2016, meaning that our registrar (2-year)
payment cycle starts on 2016-07-01 and ends on 2018-07-01. The domain is
renewed by one year at the registry as part of the transfer, setting its
registry expiration date to 2018-01-01. However, our *registrar*
expiration date is 2018-07-01, six months later.
Displaying it on the registry Whois would allow the registrant to
ascertain that his domain is safe until 2018-07-01, since it is paid
until then.
Currently, what our registrar system does instead is extend the domain by
another year (bumping the registry expiration date to 2019-01-01), so
that the registrant won't worry about losing it on 2018-01-01.
This premature renewal could be avoided with the proposed extension.

Best regards,

Thomas

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TANGO REGISTRY SERVICES®
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