Hi,
On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 08:04:03PM +0400, Alan Barrett wrote:
4.2. Registrar, registrant and admin contact for IANA domain names
The draft doesn’t mention the registrant for the IANA domain names. Should it be the IETF Trust?
The draft specifies the IETF Trust as the administrative contact. There’s an open issue about whether ICANN should be the admin contact, to satisfy concerns about stability.
There’s an open question about whether a registrar other than GoDaddy is needed, to provide a suitable level of control over which parties can make which changes.
This issue is touched on by sections 1b and 3d of the draft.
I've done some investigation of this. Here's what I learned.
Network Solutions/Web.com definitely offers the sort of facility we want. It's called, somewhat unfortunately, Web Lock (which, of course, in any search also turns into "we block", so you get about 10 billion alternatives to this). It provides a lot of granularity of control for high-value web sites, and importantly you can interlink the notifications for various actions such that multiple approvals and so on are needed. This is quite expensive -- thousands of dollars a year. This service was the source of some controversy when it was introduced, because Network Solutions sent auto-enroll notices to a large number of customers. (IMO, this was maybe the best example in a long history of the registration business snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: this is obviously a high-value service for certain kinds of user, and failing to get good press on it was a shame.)
I _believed_ that MelbourneIT had a similar service, but if it does I am unable to find any evidence of it.
Dyn (which is my employer) _will_ do this, on a case by case basis. In that case, it's all handled manually by concierge staff. At the moment I don't have a break-out of the cost, because really we only do it on request for certain kinds of customer, and they're always people using our DNS services and so on (i.e. it's basically a white-glove service). I'm not sure this would satisfy people, since it's all contractual.
I have heard tantalising rumours that Gandi will do this, but again I've been unable to find the evidence on their web site.
Maybe others closer to the domain name registration biz will know. I suggest we point to the Web Lock service and ask in the document whether any reviewers know of other examples of this, so that it could be put to bid.
In any case, I think this approach is cleaner than leaving the registrant with ICANN and handling the whole thing contractually, because in the event there's a dispute it's the registrant that, ultimately, the registrar is going to obey. That's precisely the case we're trying to guard against with all this effort, so ICANN retaining the registration seems like the wrong answer.
Best regards,
A