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ICANN has posted a set of proposed amendments for public comment along with summaries of the consultations and proposed approval process.

Background

The Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) is the contract that governs the relationship between ICANN and its accredited registrars. The current agreement has been in place since May 2001. The same contract is in place between ICANN and each of the approximately 900 accredited registrars (a directory of accredited registrars can be found at http://www.internic.net/regist.html ).

As the market has developed and the number of ICANN accredited registrars and domain name registrations have grown significantly, it has become clear that certain amendments should be made to this important agreement. The amendments are intended to provide clarity and certainty regarding the duties of registrars and the rights of registrants. This page has been created to describe the process, plans and actions for developing and implementing these amendments. Also included are links to relevant documents that have been developed and public comment fora that have been established.

In March 2007, Dr. Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN called for a comprehensive review of the RAA and the Accreditation process. The results of that review included a workshop at ICANN’s meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico and to Board resolutions describing an approach for arriving at and implementing amendments. In accordance with that resolution, ICANN has solicited public input for possible changes to the RAA and the accreditation process. ICANN has drafted proposed amendments in accordance with that input, information received at workshops and public fora to date, and consultations with the gTLD Registrar Constituency. A set of proposed amendments has now been published for additional comment before they are submitted as advice to the Board for action.

Announcements & Resolutions

• ICANN Seeks Public Comment on Draft Proposed Changes to the RAA
  18 June 2008
• ICANN Releases RAA Public Consultation Comments
  23 October 2007
• Adopted Board Resolutions Consultation on Registrar Accreditation Agreement Amendments
  29 June 2007, San Juan, Puerto Rico
• Protecting Registrants Focus of ICANN Workshop
  25 June 2007
• Adopted Board Resolution — Protections for gTLD Registrants
  30 March 2007, Lisbon, Portugal
• Registrar Accreditation Policy and Process Must Be Reviewed
  21 March 2007

Important Documents

• Registrar Accreditation Agreement
• Registrar Accreditation Process

Proposed Amendments

For a background description of the current process and proposed amendments see:

<Proposed Changes to Registrar Accreditation Agreement>

This document contains a description of the categories of changes under consideration, a History of the Consultations to date, and a summary of the actual Proposed Amendments.

To see a comparison chart showing both Current RAA Language and Proposed Language see:

<RAA Provisions Comparison> [PDF, 40K]

To see a copy of the current RAA with redlined changes indicating where all of the amendments appear see:

<Redline 2001 RAA> [PDF, 79K]

To comment on any of these, please send comments to <raa-consultation@icann.org> by the deadline of 18 July 2008.

Below are some of the original documents describing possible amendments to the RAA. Alternatively, you can view them in plain text on a separate webpage. These documents were assembled first as a result of Paul Twomey's recommendations that were announced on 21 March 2007. These were discussed briefly with the gTLD Registrar Constituency at the Lisbon and San Juan ICANN meetings and publicly at the Workshop on Protection of Registrants in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 25 June 2007.

Each of the documents below describes the intent and purpose of the proposed amendment, as well as some of the issues concerning potential implementation of such an amendment. Comments on each of these can be made in the comment forum described below.

• Eliminating the Practice of Obtaining ICANN Accreditation by Purchase [PDF, 21K]
• Improved Contractual Compliance Enforcement Tools [PDF, 20K]
• Potential Group Liability of Registrars Owned by a Single Entity [PDF, 20K]
• Registrar Data Escrow of Data Underlying Privacy Registrations [PDF, 22K]
• Management of Reseller Relationships [PDF, 21K]
• Skills Testing or Certification of Registrar Personnel [PDF, 20K]

Workshop transcript: http://sanjuan2007.icann.org/files/sanjuan/SanJuan-ProtectionOfRegistrants-25June07.txt [TXT, 112K]

Workshops and Presentations

Protection of Registrants Workshop
25 June 2007, San Juan

• Transcript: http://sanjuan2007.icann.org/files/sanjuan/SanJuan-ProtectionOfRegistrants-25June07.txt [TXT, 112K]

Public Forum: Issues Arising out of Recent Experiences with RegisterFly
26 March 2007 Lisbon

• Presentation: Domain name Registration Issues
• Transcript: http://www.icann.org/meetings/lisbon/transcript-public1-26mar07.htm.htm (second half of transcript)

At Large Policy Working Group on Registrant / Registrar Relations

This working group will look at the entire scope of the RAA (Registrar Accreditation Agreement), and recommend concrete steps to the larger At-Large community.

A mailing list, RAA-WG, can be subscribed to from http://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/raa-wg_atlarge-lists.icann.org.

Public Forums

A new Public Comment period has been opened that will remain open from 18 June 2008 through 4 August 2008.

For this new comment period:

Send comments to: raa-consultation@icann.org

View comments at: http://forum.icann.org/lists/raa-consultation

An initial Public Comment period was open from 30 July 2007 through 10 September 2007. It was established for the purposes of: soliciting input regarding potential amendments to the RAA; specific comment on the amendments subjects briefed above; soliciting input regarding potential changes to the registrar accreditation process. Comments for this phase of the review were synthesized to inform and refine proposed amendments. This synthesis of comments can be found in plain text here or at the following link as a pdf file: http://www.icann.org/topics/raa/raa-public-comments-23oct07.pdf [PDF, 61K]