Domain name registration

The Internet Engineering Task Force will host a session this week to discuss whether the international standards body should develop a generic protocol for communications between domain name registries and registrars.

VeriSign currently uses its own Registry Registrar Protocol (RRP) for all communications related to domain name registrations in the .com, .net and .org top-level domains. However, RRP has been criticized for being so streamlined that it lacks a secure transfer mechanism and advanced functionality.

Demand for a new domain name registration protocol has risen following the recent selection of seven new top-level domains by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. All of the registries for these new top-level domains have proposed different communications protocols than RRP.

Domain name registrars are concerned that having multiple registration protocols will be difficult and expensive to support.

"To registrars, it's a very dangerous idea to think of seven new top-level domains requiring seven new RRPs," says Ross Rader, director of research and innovation at Tucows, a Canadian domain name registrar. "We'd like to start work on a common RRP. We hope we can quickly come up with a new standard."

VeriSign engineers have developed a new version of RRP that they will demonstrate at the IETF session. The new protocol, called the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP), is based on XML and has been published as a draft document by the IETF.

"VeriSign's EPP draft is pretty interesting," says Rick Wesson, an IETF participant and the president of Alice's Registry, which sells software to domain name registrars. "It takes care of a few of the problems that we've had with RRP. . . . And it can be used to provision all kinds of different services. It's much more flexible than RRP."

Domain name registrars are hopeful that the IETF will form a working group to develop a generic domain registration protocol.

"We're now in a situation where all these new commands are going to have to be added to RRP, and a bunch of new registries are all going to do it their own way," says Robert Gardos, chief technology officer at Register.com, a New York domain name registrar. "What we need is a baseline set of commands that are standard."