Monstrous ICANN policy nobody noticed to be on its way

Last year in September, ICANN announced new rules that would need to be applied to updating the information of the owner of a gTLD domain name. This includes the new gTLD’s, but also .com, .net, .org,….  Previously there were no rules at all regarding updates to the owner information of such a domain name. This new ICANN Transfer Policy however is more strict than what most country code registries enforce.

The new procedures should have gone into effect the first of August 2016. But after “feedback from the community”, ICANN changed some wording and removed a clear error in the procedure. And because of this, delayed the enforcement for 5 months, until December 2016. Regretfully the actual proposed procedure has not been tampered with.

If you want to update contact details of your domain name, do it now. Do certainly make sure to check your e-mail address is correct. Any update will require a verification that by most registrars will be carried out via e-mail. If your e-mail address isn’t working, you will be at the mercy of your registrar to foresee alternative procedures for this.

Verification however needs to be done via a “secure mechanism”. So alternative procedures are scarce, time consuming and costly. They need to involve sending a code to the owner (maybe via old fashioned snail mail if the e-mail doesn’t work) which then is returned to the registrar to confirm the change. It is safe to assume to most price-focused registrars will only offer the cheapest and easiest procedure. Certainly if you know that most requests to update the e-mail address of the owner of a domain name are carried out to ready it for an outgoing transfer, you probably shouldn’t expect too much of an effort from the bargain registrars.

And if you want to transfer your domain name elsewhere, make sure to start thinking about it months up front. The new rules also state that a domain name can not be transferred to an other registrar the first 60 days after an update to the e-mail address of the owner of the domain name. This is a procedure which actually is against the policy that is in force right now. Even though large registrars like GoDaddy do already enforce it upon their clients and against which has been lots of protest.

For some reason, there has been hardly any outcry from the registrar and registrant community about this new transfer policy. It very much looks like it has remained under the radar. Most people will probably notice once they try to transfer their domain name and are unable to do so because of these new rules.