In Parts I and II of this series of blog posts I described the need for a registration operations industry association. At the end of Part II, I wrote that Part III will describe “an opportunity for everyone that’s interested in discussing this topic in a live environment.” The large number of people attending ICANN 51 in Los Angeles presents the best chance of discussion with many potential participants being in the same place at the same time. Let’s take advantage of that proximity.

Verisign will host a workshop for all interested people during the week of ICANN 51. The event will be held at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza hotel (the same venue for ICANN 51, though this event is not affiliated with ICANN) on the morning of Thursday, October 16, 2014, to discuss the challenges of registration technical operations and to explore ways to address those challenges. We’ve set up a website at www.regiops.net to provide information, describe the event, and allow people to register. We’re asking people to register in advance so we can make sure that we have a large enough room reserved and that we provide enough food for breakfast and lunch.

In Part I of this series of blog posts I described the need for an industry association of operators to discuss the technical tasks, such as the development, deployment, and ongoing systems administration of the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP), performed by registries and registrars to ensure interoperability and share best practices when providing registration services. In this blog post I’ll describe a way to make that happen.

I’ve spoken to a number of registrars who have described the challenges they face in implementing the many different EPP extensions being developed by registry operators. Here’s a concrete example: the Net::DRI Perl implementation of an EPP client includes contact extensions for 24 different registries. A registrar that wishes to manage contacts with those registries needs to implement a contact extension for each one! With the addition of new gTLDs and many new registry operators with new business models the number of extensions can only increase. How would an industry association address these challenges and reduce confusion for everyone? How could an association be structured?

Since 2001 there have been occasional conversations on technical mailing lists exploring the concept of creating an independent industry association or consortium of domain registration operators. My recent experiences with the evolution of extensions to the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) have convinced me to look at these suggestions more closely, and I’m now convinced that this is an idea worth exploring.

“Registration Operations” refers to the technical tasks, such as the development, deployment, and ongoing systems administration of EPP, performed by registries and registrars to provide registration services. While EPP is used to provide domain name registration and management services, registration operations also include the tasks performed by Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) to provide address registration and systems administration services.