Will EURid change transfer and trade procedure in 2012?

EURid (.eu registry) has made a proposal to change the transfer and trade procedure for a .eu name during 2012. The aim would be to replace the current procedure with a quicker procedure that is also more in line to standard transfer procedures of other TLD’s.

The current procedure works as follows: If you wish to transfer a .eu-name, the current owner will receive an email from the registry, once the transfer has been launched, asking him/her to confirm the transfer. If you launch a trade for a .eu-name, both the current and the new owner will receive an email from the registry asking them to confirm this trade. Once the confirmation has been given by the involved parties for either trade or transfer, EURid first carries out a manual verification of the requested transfer or trade and then (if everything is okay) completes the request. This means that .eu transfers or trades are only completed during office hours.

After an enquiry during November 2011 amongst the registrar community, EURid now checks whether it would be interesting to change the current procedure. This means that the system of confirming via email would disappear and they would switch to using an authorisation code, a so-called EPP key. Specifically this would mean that the current owner needs to ask his current registrar to provide him this code and the current owner then needs to send this code to the new registrar (for a transfer) or to the new owner (for a trade). If it’s a trade, the new owner then needs to send this code to the new registrar. There will no longer be a manual verification by EURid in the new procedure. Once the new registrar has received the auth code and forwarded it to the registry, the transfer is instantly completed.

This makes the new procedure resemble almost exactly that of for example .nl or .de transfers and look very much alike to that of for example .be and even a bit like that of all generic extensions like .com, .net, …

With the old procedure, EURid was more involved in the complete process and this made it easy for owners of domain names to transfer away their name even if the current registrar registrar was unwilling to cooperate. The new procedure normally does require cooperation of the current registrar, but EURid has foreseen a back-up for such events. The owner of the domain name will for example be able to easily request an auth code via de website from EURid, which will then be sent to the e-mail address shown in the Whois. And if that e-mail address isn’t correct, then they will be able to request the auth code via a signed fax to the registry.

If the registry doesn’t receive major objections against this proposal, they expect the documentation for those new procedures will be completed around June 2012. The new procedures would then be implemented around the end of 2012.