A non-amicable transfer of the .jobs registry contract would be challenging.
Last month ICANN surprised many observers by sending a breach notice to .jobs registry Employ Media.
This was a shock because ICANN’s board had approved recent changes to how .jobs operates. The breach notice seems to attack some of those very changes that were contemplated by the board.
But what exactly would happen if Employ Media lost .jobs?
In theory the contract would just be awarded to another registry. A termination of its agreement will require “the parties agree to work cooperatively to facilitate and implement the transition of the registry for the TLD in accordance with this Section 6.4,” according to the contract.
But I’m not confident in this process. I reached out last week to ICANN to find out exactly how this transition would work, but the non-profit is unavailable to comment citing preparations for next week’s ICANN meeting in San Francisco.
So, how much faith do you have in ICANN for a smooth transition? There are few direct comparisons to this situation.
Remember RegisterFly? We found out ICANN was woefully unprepared for a large registrar meltdown in that fiasco.
It’s possible ICANN’s breach notice is an elaborate bluff. I’m still scratching my head as it seems one arm of ICANN wasn’t talking to the other. But this may be an attempt to get a leg up in the power struggle with Employ Media. Perhaps they want Society of Human Resource Management to get worried and bug Employ Media about its plans. Maybe SHRM’s members who have .jobs domains — such as ATT.jobs — will start asking questions.
If ICANN does follow through with termination, you can bet Employ Media will file for arbitration. It will be a lengthy process, and the termination will probably be stayed through that process.
Bottom line: I have little faith in this process. It’s a process that will become commonplace with new TLDs.
Hopefully someone is preparing for that.
Kevin Murphy says
VeriSign already runs the SRS, the DNS resolution, billing, pretty much all the important back-end technical systems. The registrant data will also be escrowed.
I don’t think there would be many serious technical risks with a transition, unless the new contractor decided to use a different back-end provider.
Legal risk, certainly.
Andrew Allemann says
Kevin, when VeriSign took over .name were they already the backend registry?
Kevin Murphy says
Yup. I believe they were.
The only large gTLD transition I can think of off the top of my head was when Afilias took over .org’s back-end from VeriSign. Happens more frequently in ccTLDs of course.
Andrew Allemann says
Hmmm. I wonder if the registry back end partners for new TLDs will end up running many of them when the original applicants give up.
theo says
RegisterFly is imo a bad example. Sure ICANN handled that one rather poorly. But it was also a big wake up call for ICANN.
Now if Employ Media loses .jobs (don’t think it will happen) but lets assume it happens ..We got Neustar, Verisign and a bunch more who can take over without too much hassles.
There is one but….and that being if they think they can operate the registry with profit. Intresting times for sure.
Jothan Frakes says
Let’s hope not to see any re-delegation on .jobs, and that the current tangle loosens a bit.
I have faith that the current impasse will clear.
Returning to the context of registry transition….
ICANN has done a large amount of preparatory work for the eventuality of a registry transition – under hostile or friendly circumstances, or even in event of natural disaster and other circumstances.
As Kevin points out, there is a healthy cocoon that .jobs lives in currently. Thick whois and mandatory data escrow makes for domain registrant information to transition gracefully.
The real challenges would come from a change of provider, especially in the presence of any policy or business logic that is enforced technically that might not get transitioned, and if their provisioning systems were dramatically different, such as materially different XML formats or response codes.
That would mean that the registrars who are currently integrated would have to pivot to the new provider, and work out any of the provisioning/integration for managing existing registrations.
It takes development to pivot like that.
That development is a new cost that the registrar doesn’t have new revenue to offset, so it sometimes does not get the prioritization that new revenue would.
Factoring in the registration footprint that .jobs has presently due to the severely restricted nature of its initial charter, we’re talking about many registrars (and we could validate this against the registry reports that .jobs would have provided to ICANN in their monthly or quarterly reports) who have under 100 .jobs domains in management, who would have to spend money in orders of magnitude contrasted to even 20 years of the met revenue – just to preserve those clients names.
Afilias did a quite competent job of the .org transition, and that’s the largest such transition that’s occurred to date.