eco Association offers platform for international collaboration
The US American company and eco member Verisign will be making use of the coming ICANN meeting in in Los Angeles from 12-16.10.2014 to introduce their initiative for the establishment of a Registration Operations Association. As an alternative to the founding of a new association, the eco Names & Numbers Forum will make itself available as an established platform – as it has done previously in conjunction with the CENTR General Assembly on 30 September in Brussels – in order to support the initiative.
The background to this is a call to action from the Senior Director of Verisign, Scott Hollenbeck, to create a platform for the standardization of the EPP protocol. The XML-based Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) is used, for example, to process Domain registrations or Domain transfers between registries and registrars. The protocol can be extended flexibly. According to Hollenbeck, this possibility is being used, increasingly frequently, particularly with the new gTLD program. The effort required to implement the new TLDs, he continued, has increased for registries, and has led to several problems. He has summarized his extensive thoughts on this topic and reasons for action in a series of blog posts: http://www.circleid.com/members/7238
eco has already made contact with its members through the Names & Numbers Forum regarding this, and the majority of them support an initiative for the standardization of the EPP protocol. With a total of almost 800 members, the association already unites a large number of companies from the Domain industry at the international level, and as a result offers the basis and the infrastructure to facilitate the exchange between registrars and registries.
With a staff of more than 100, the association can also provide the necessary resources to actively conduct such an initiative. The eco Association will therefore position itself as an established Domain industry association at the Kick-off Meeting on 16.10.2014 during ICANN 51 in Los Angeles, and offer its support for the initiative. eco Director of Names & Numbers Thomas Rickert, and Lars Steffen from the Member Services Department, will participate in the event and will be available to discuss the initiative.
