ICANN Accredited Domain Registrar FOR SALE?

MARINA DEL REY, Calif.: Increased protection for those registering domain names is ICANN’s goal as it launches consultations on its Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) and the accreditation process for companies who register domains.

“I called for the review of RAA and the accreditation back in March, and I’m pleased to be moving into the active consultation phase,” said Dr Paul Twomey, ICANN’s CEO and President. “The need for this review is clear. The current RAA is more than six years old. We’ve seen the number of accredited registrars grow to more than 900. And we’ve seen the incredible difficulties that can be unleashed with the collapse of a Registrar.”

The RAA is the contract that governs the relationship between ICANN and its accredited registrars. The current version was put in place in May 2001. The same contract is in place between ICANN and each of the more than 900 accredited registrars (a directory of which can be found at http://www.internic.net/regist.html ).

The consultation is looking for ideas and input on amendments to the RAA and the registrar accreditation process in order to provide additional protection to registrants. Previous discussions in the ICANN community has already helped create a number of suggestions for discussion, which are:

* Incorporating provisions to govern the terms under which a registrar can be sold and continue to retain its ICANN accreditation.
* Including additional contract enforcement tools offering more options than the current one option – terminating accreditation.
* Addressing the responsibilities of a parent owner/manager when one or more of a “family” of registrars fails to comply with ICANN requirements.
* Requiring registrars to escrow contact information for customers who register domain names using Whois privacy and Whois proxy services.
* Augmenting the responsibilities placed on registrars with regard to their relationships with resellers.
* Requiring operator skills training and testing for all ICANN-accredited Registrars.

Details of these proposals, as well as the consultation process, are available on ICANN”s website at http://www.icann.org/topics/raa/.