From: Kirk Fletcher 
Sent: Monday, 3 March 2003 4:22 PM
To: Jo Lim
Subject: Comments on draft transfer policy...

Greetings,

auDA recently responded to submissions regarding changes to the transfer policy:

     http://www.auda.org.au/docs/auda-transfers-response.pdf

This email will respond to points contained in that document.

1. Requiring email confirmation.

auDA claims that email confirmation is necessary for the following
reasons:

i) registrants do not understand the significance of the domain password

My response: How does an email requirement deal with this?
With a domain password, people can redelegate the domain, change contact details, 
and so on.  A change of registrar is a relatively minor change in comparison.  In 
fact, since confirmation emails are sent to the owner's email address, and this 
address can be changed with the password, the requirement for email confirmation 
achieves nothing and contributes in no way to the (alleged) problem of "registrants 
not understanding" what a password is.

This argument was dismissed by many of the public submissions, yet you still bring 
it up here as though it was never addressed (without providing a counter argument).  
It seems that the gist of your review was "Lots of people think [x], but we disagree" 
- yet provide no real explanation....

ii) registrants don't understand that registration is separate from other services 
such as hosting.

My response:  Boy, you really don't think much of registrant's intelligence, do you?  
The biggest thing that registrants don't understand is why its so difficult to 
transfer their domain to a competing registrar.

iii) transfers would be easily susceptible to deceptive practices (such as fake 
renewal notices/invoices).

My response: As I mentioned at point (i) - and as a few people pointed out in their 
previous submission of comments: if you have the password, you can change the address 
to which this confirmation email is sent to.... this requirement does nothing to stop 
deceptive practices and serves only to hinder legitimate transfers.

Now onto section 2 of the auDA response...

2. Requiring the registrar to renew their license when they transfer.

I may have more comments on this later.  However, there are
at least a couple points I need to make:

The requirement that the losing registrar cannot charge for losing the domain is fair 
(since any attempt by them to charge would be anti-competitive).  However, the 
requirement that the gaining registrar is NOT ALLOWED to charge is not appropriate.  
Given the requirements for confirming a transfer (which often requires considerable 
time to chase up), it may be perfectly reasonable for some resellers to charge an 
administrative fee (though obviously not a "registration fee").

Furthermore, as the registrar of record is the one that provides support for the domain, 
it is perfectly reasonable that they may want charge a transfer fee to cover this 
service also.

We probably wouldn't charge for this ourselves - but others might (and its one of 
those things that is best left for the market to sort out).

I'd also suggest a 60 day limit on new domains in which transfers are not permitted 
(similar to gTLD's).

Regards,
Kirk Fletcher
CTO, Enetica