ICANN Seeks Escrow Provider for Whois Data
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007
ICANN is seeking a company to escrow registrant data for domain names.
When domain registrar RegisterFly’s crooked activities finally caught up to it, thousands of domain owners were left in no man’s land. They had difficulty transferring their domains to other registrars. Data about owners was lost and it became difficult for domain owners to get control of their domains.
Last week ICANN posted a request for proposal for an escrow agent to hold registrant data in the event of a registrar meltdown. As explained in the RFP:
Through the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) all accredited registrars have agreed to submit to ICANN or an approved escrow agent certain enumerated registration records pursuant to a schedule, format, and terms established by ICANN. Upon termination or expiration without renewal of a registrar’s RAA, the deposited registration records may be used by ICANN to transfer management of the registrations to another registrar…
…Through the RDE program, ICANN seeks to ensure protection of registrants in the event of registrar failure or other termination of a registrar’s accreditation agreement. Through this RFP ICANN seeks to engage an agent to provide RDE services for those registrars who elect not to escrow data with an independent third-party escrow agent.
The full request for proposal can be found here.
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Why is the registry considered untrustworthy for this task? They’re in the best position to transfer data to a different registrar, if need be.
Their obligations for privacy and response times and such would need to be spelled out and I guess they’d need to be compensated
Good point I hadn’t thought about. But the .travel registry facing bankruptcy may make people think twice.
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