[registrars] Regarding compulsory public display of expiry date

[Bruce Tonkin]

Hello Jay,

> 
> Your proposal of eliminating that expiration date field 
> should be discussed with domain registrants that have large 
> portfolios. 


At no stage have I heard any proposals not to provide the expiry date to
registrants.   

What I find hard to understand is the idea that as a registrant the
expiry date of my agreement should be public.    Perhaps at least this
should be at the discretion of the registrant on an "opt-in" basis.  I
am more than happy to publish the expiry date if the registrant requests
me to do so.

Can you give examples where this happens with other Internet services?

Domain names on their own do nothing.  You need to associate them with
an email ro hosting service which also typically have terms of use and
terms of agreement.

E.g I have software licences, hosting agreements, registrar agreement
with ICANN, etc - and none of these expiry dates are public.

However I can easily find this information from the party with whom I
have an agreement.

I assume you are referring to the issue where some registrants with
large numbers of names used in the pay-per-click market may have
obtained their names using pools of registrars, and therefore their
names are spread across many registrars, and they probably have little
relationship with those registrars  (in fact may not even know who they
are).   Luckily the industry supports the transfer of names to a single
provider to make the management of domain names far easier.   Many
corporations with large numbers of names have done this.

I would say that the use of the transfer mechanism is a simple solution
for these large holders of names, that want to consolidate the
management of their names.  Also the Verisign registry also has a
service where you can synchronise the expiry dates of large numbers of
domain names.

Overall the benefits for the tens of millions of registrants that have a
direct relationship with their registrar or reseller in terms of
stronger domain name protection from not publicly displaying such
information, I think outweighs the downside to a few registrants.

This has been very successful in .au.

I see no justification for requiring the compulsory public display of
information that relates to a registrant.

You mention the distinction between large and small registrars.  I don't
think it is a size issue, but a business model issue.  Some accredited
registrars rely on the public display of data for their business models,
which in some cases do not involve the actual registration of domain
names.

To address your concern, I would support an amendment to Ross's paper,
that requires registrars to publicly display the expiry date information
at the explicit request of the registrant.

Regards,
Bruce Tonkin