ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, announced Monday that it has released new rules for inter-registrar domain transfers. The new rules are designed to “Provide benefit to registrants in that they can more freely move their domain name from one registrar to another if they so desire, and further Encourage competition in the DNS among registrars”.

The new guidelines advise registrars to create special email accounts for the purpose of sending and receiving domain transfer related email only. ICANN then requires registrars to reply to these emails in a timely manner, which may not exceed 7 calendar days.

Registrars will also be required to develop and implement a system to undo domain transfers. The system “will be used by the registry to reverse erroneous or noncompliant transfers. “

The new rules will officially take effect on November 12th of this year. All disputes before the 12th will abide by the current policy, and transfers initiated after this date will bind to the new policy.

For more information on this topic, visit ICANN’s official advisory on the matter located at http://www.icann.org/announcements/advisory-12jul04.htm.

For the official Transfer Policy, visit http://www.icann.org/transfers/policy-12jul04.htm.

About ICANN
“The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is an internationally organized, non-profit corporation that has responsibility for Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management, and root server system management functions. These services were originally performed under U.S. Government contract by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and other entities. ICANN now performs the IANA function.”