| The Internet Society, in the form of the nonprofit Public Interest Registry (PIR), has assumed responsibility for the .org domain registry, but the transition has apparantly left thousands of organizations with an impaired ability to manage their domains. Last week we were transfering a number of The Gilbert Center domains to a new registrar and all of the .org transfers failed. The issue surfaced publicly on the NTEN Circuit Rider's mailing list yesterday.
What's happened is that the contact information for domains is no longer showing up in most of the databases. (These are called the WHOIS records.) You'll see an example of the incomplete information at the WHOIS database maintained by PIR itself. This means that a registrar cannot contact the owner of a domain in order to initiate transfers. They cannot confirm who controls the domain. There may be other impacts I haven't thought of yet.
As one list member explained it, PIR is currently running a "thin" registry. This means that the only place you can look up complete information on a domain is with the registrar currently managing the particular domain. Unfortunately, it seems that many if not most of those registrars don't know this.
Thanks to Adam Bernstein, Michelle Murrain, Dan Scharfman, Helen Seal, and Jim Skillington and the Circuit Riders list. I highly recommend them and this community. For background on the issue of the transfer of the .org registry, see The Power of Names.
Posted: 2/7/03; 11:59:55 AM # |