ICANN will remove the 60-day domain transfer lock

At the 82nd ICANN meeting held in Seattle this week, ICANN voted to remove the controversial 60-day transfer lock policy. This decision is a major adjustment to the 20-year-old domain name registration policy, which aims to improve the efficiency and user experience of domain name management. The following are the specific contents of this policy adjustment:

1. Cancel the 60-day transfer lock: Under the current policy, when a user purchases a domain name from another registrant, or changes his name, organization, or email address, a 60-day transfer lock will be triggered, during which the domain name cannot be transferred to another registrar. The new policy will completely eliminate this lock to meet the needs of registrants to consolidate their portfolios to their preferred registrar.

2. Simplify the registrant change process:

Cancel the notification requirement for both buyers and sellers. Since notification does not provide much protection when the email of the lost registrant has been leaked, the new policy eliminates this link.

The process of managing registrant data changes will be separated from the "Transfer Policy" and made independent as the "Registrant Data Change Policy" to optimize the management structure.

3. Introducing new lock measures:

Registrants are required to implement a 720-hour (30-day) lock on newly created or recently transferred domain names. This measure helps reduce credit card fraud and assists in compliance with trademark complaint regulations such as the UDRP.

Any registrar currently implementing a longer lock period must reduce it to 720 hours; registrars that have not yet implemented such a lock period must do so.

4. Other important changes:

Updated the list of reasons for registrars to refuse transfers to explicitly mention DNS abuse (as currently defined in the ICANN registry and registrar contract).

Made multiple changes to terminology, required notifications, and instructions for processing transfer authorization codes, which registrars and registrars must implement if they want to continue to comply with the ICANN contract.

For bulk portfolio transfers, the registration fee for portfolios of more than 50,000 domain names is limited to US$50,000.

Incorporate the updated Bulk Transfers after Partial Portfolio Acquisition (BTAPPA) directly into the Transfer Policy, eliminating the need for registries to submit requests to ICANN through the Registry Services Evaluation process.

These recommendations have been unanimously approved by the GNSO Council and will be submitted to the ICANN Board for final approval. Once approved, the ICANN/GNSO team will write the final updated Transfer Policy. After that, registries and registrars will have some time to implement the new policy, and once implementation is complete, the policy will officially take effect and compliance will begin to monitor enforcement. The entire process is expected to take at least 18 months.