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Thick Whois policy for .com is now live

Kevin Murphy, February 2, 2017, 14:00:33 (UTC), Domain Registries

The domain name industry is kicking off one of its most fundamental shifts in its plumbing this week.
Over the next two years, Verisign and every registrar that sells .com domains will have to rejigger their systems to convert .com from a “thin” to “thick” Whois.
This means that by February 1, 2019, Verisign will for the first time control the master database of all Whois records for .com domains, rather than it being spread piecemeal across all registrars.
The switch comes as a result of a years-in-the-making ICANN policy that officially came into force yesterday. It also applies to .com stablemates .net and .jobs.
The first big change will come August 1 this year, the deadline by which Verisign has to give all of its registrars the ability to submit thick Whois records both live (for new regs) and in bulk (for existing ones).
May 1, 2018 is the deadline for all registrars to start submitting thick Whois for new regs to Verisign, but they can start doing so as early as August this year if they want to.
Registrars have until February 1, 2019 to supply Verisign with thick Whois for all their existing registrations.
There’s a process for registrars who believe they would be violating local privacy laws by transferring this data to US-based Verisign to request an exemption, which may prevent the transition going perfectly uniformly.
Some say that the implementation of this policy may allow Verisign to ask for the ability to ask a for an increase in .com registry fees — currently frozen at the command of the US government — due to its inevitably increased costs.
Personally, I think the added costs will likely be chickenfeed compared to the cash-printing machine that is .com, so I think it’s far from a slam-dunk that such fee increases would be approved.

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Comments (4)

  1. Eric Lyon says:

    Interesting. I wonder if Verisign will actually push for a .com registration fee increase? With the high dollar fee’s of some of a lot of the new gTLD’s, I don’t think they will have any problems getting people pay for an inflation on .com, as long as it’s reasonable.

  2. Kate says:

    What was the problem we are trying to solve again ?

  3. Rubens Kuhl says:

    They will likely ask for a .com registration fee increase of 1 or 2 cents, just to make the point that added workload needs added compensation.

  4. bestical says:

    what is the problem with thin whois result?

Leave a Reply to Rubens Kuhl