Re: [nc-imp] Draft 3 of Transfers Implementation Committee Report - with changes highlighted

[Andrew Sullivan <andrew@libertyrms.info>]

Hi all,

With regret, I suddenly find I cannot make today's conference call. 
I wanted to mention, however, that I think the current draft has by
and large addressed the issues I was concerned about in the earlier
drafts.  I am especially in favour of two recommendations: (a) that
some additional restrictions be placed on transfers during a dispute
period, in order to avoid "laundering" of transfers, especially if
some sort of transfer undo facility is to be provided; (b) that the
whois to be used as the source of contact data may potentially, at
least, be the registry's whois (in case of a "thick" registry).

As noted in the comments to no 16, (b) seems to entail that some
decision needs to be made about what will be the authoritative whois
in the case of disputes.

I wonder, therefore, whether the implementation committee needs to
come up with a recommendation about that.  I would actually prefer
not to do so, but it seems that the dispute-resolution portion of the
recommendations would not be implementable without saying something
on the matter.  I'll leave that decision up to everyone else,
however.

Since I can't make the call today, I'll nevertheless include some
remarks here about what I think the position should be, if we do
decide we have to say something about the authoritative whois for
dispute-resolution.  

If I understood him correctly, Ross expressed some reservations about
optimising for the small number of cases which end up in dispute.  He
therefore suggested that, both for reasons of simplicity and
accuracy, it would be best always to specify the losing registrar's
whois server as the authority.

The problem with that approach, as I see it, is that "thick"
registries already have contracts which specify the registry's whois
as authoritative.  In order to implement the model dispute resolution
process, then, those registries would have to inist upon using the
registry whois as the authority, or else they would have to
renegotiate their existing contracts.  Since I think the latter is
unlikely, I think we have to say that the thick registries' whois
data is authoritative in the case of dispute.  If instead the
decision is that the losing registrar's whois is to be the authority,
I don't think it would be a good idea for thick registries to agree
to participate in dispute resolution.  It appears likely to create
liability problems with which I am uncomfortable.

A

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Andrew Sullivan                         204-4141 Yonge Street
Liberty RMS                           Toronto, Ontario Canada
<andrew@libertyrms.info>                              M2P 2A8
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