ICANN | Letter from Tina Dam to Bruce Beckwith

Letter from Tina Dam to Bruce Beckwith

7 August 2003

By Postal Mail

Los Angeles, 7 August 2003

Mr Bruce W. Beckwith
Vice President, Operations

Public Interest Registry
1775 Wiehle Avenue, Suite 102A
Reston, VA 20190

Dear Mr. Beckwith,

Thank you for informing ICANN that Public Interest Registry currently is experiencing problems regarding EPP/"thick" data items such as "registrant email" and "registrant phone number", during the RRP to EPP conversion.

I understand that the current .org registry RRP to EPP Transition Plan requires that registrars collect these two data elements, and also that the Whois specification calls for the registry to display these two data elements, which registrars were not previously required to collect or display.

ICANN wishes to afford PIR and affected registrars all appropriate flexibility to go forward with the transition despite this problem. Accordingly, ICANN has no objection to PIR allowing registrars to insert and maintain temporary "placeholder" data in the fields in question for a reasonable period of time post cut-over to EPP. ICANN consider up to the end of 2003 to be a reasonable period of time. Should additional time be necessary, please contact us to discuss further arrangements.

For the registrant telephone number, examples of appropriate"placeholder" data include the phone number of the admin contact, or the registrar's own telephone number. For the registrant e-mail address, examples of appropriate "placeholder" data include the current value (not@available.org) or the e-mail address of the admin contact. (In the alternative, a registrar might want to use an email such as configured with an auto-reply stating "This domain record has been transitioned to Public Interest Registry; however, the registrant's email and phone number have not yet been updated. Please contact the registrar at info@exampleregistrar.com if you require further assistance.")

Thank you for consulting ICANN concerning this issue. Hopefully the approach outlined above will be satisfactory. Please feel free to contact me if you have questions or if I can be of any other assistance.

Best Regards,

Tina Dam
Chief gTLD Registry Liaison

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers