The SIDN will change transfer procedure soon

The SIDN (.nl registry) has announced they’ll soon change the transfer procedure for the .nl domain. This will happen on May 17th 2011. This change reflects the findings of a survey which was held amongst .nl participants (.nl registrars) and .nl registrants.

The current transfer procedure is the following: the owner of the domain name asks his current registrar for the epp code, the so called token, of his domain name. Once he receives this, he needs to send this to new registrar. The new registrar can then initiate the transfer. Once the transfer has been initiated, a 5 days grace period begins. After this grace period the transfer is completed. During those 5 days, the current registrar can approve the transfer or the new registrar can reject the transfer. The survey showed that the majority of .nl registrars and registrants considered those 5 days as rather useless.

The new transfer procedure will drop this 5 days grace period. So the owner still needs to get the token for the name from his current registrar and he needs to send it to the new registrar. The new registrar will then initiate the transfer, which will now be completed almost immediately instead of after 5 days.

The fact that the registration period starts over again after a .nl transfer doesn’t change. So the best thing to do, is still to transfer the .nl domain name as closely to its expiration date as possible, in order to loose a minimum of the registration period.