Five domain name registrars, including GoDaddy, signed the new registrar accreditation agreement today.
Five domain name registrars signed the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) during a signing ceremony at ICANN’s meeting in Durban today.
The group was headlined by GoDaddy, which registers about half of all new domain names.
The 2013 RAA places significant new requirements on domain registrars, including validating registrant information and retaining data even after a customer leaves for a competitor.
“The major requirements like WHOIS validation and email verification are required to be in place by January 1,” GoDaddy Senior Director of ICANN Policy & Planning James Bladel told Domain Name Wire in an interview today. “It won’t hit all at once. We’ll phase it in between now and the end of the year.”
Signing the new RAA is a requirement to sell new top level domain names, so you can expect other major registrars to sign soon.
Once a couple more big registrars sign the agreement, it will trigger clauses in the proposed contract renewals for .org, .biz. and .info that will require registrars offering those domains to sign up for the new RAA within about a year.
Despite the added demands on domain name registrars, Bladel thinks the agreement is more stable than previous ones and a step forward for the industry.
“The whole industry is going to be raised to a higher level of consumer confidence and transparency,” he said.
GoDaddy was one of five domain name registrars that negotiated the terms of the new RAA. Two of the other negotiating registrars, Momentous and Mark Montior, also signed the agreement today.
Frank Michlick (DomainCocoon) says
Wonder when we’ll know the names of the other two registrars.
The 2009 RAA already requires retention of customer data for three years after they leave.
The registrant address validation is currently being defined by a working group that I joined, we’ll see what comes out of that.
I still think that the requirements for validation will possibly just increase the cost of domain name registration, but won’t improve the accuracy of data that much, especially for those sites that are targeted with the addition of this clause by the GAC.