Third Annual WDRP Survey & Compliance Audit
Each year, ICANN asks registrars to describe and provide feedback about their implementation of the Whois Data Reminder Policy (WDRP) through a short survey and compliance audit. By now your registrar should have received an email from ICANN requesting its participation in this survey/audit. We rely on your cooperation in this process so that we may ensure compliance with the policy and report to the community on aggregate compliance statistics.
In response to feedback we received last year, this year we are making registrar participation a bit easier. If you participated in last year’s survey, you will notice that the questions have been clarified this year (and reduced from ten to nine). Also, if you are listed as primary contact for more than ten registrars, rather than sending you a notice for each registrar, we emailed you a spreadsheet to provide data for all associated registrars at once.
As noted in our cover letter, ICANN’s compliance staff followed up last year with nearly every non-responsive registrar to audit their compliance with the WDRP. While we plan to do so again this year, we hope you will help us out by submitting this data before the 28th October 2006 deadline.
As a reminder, please feel free to include a link to ICANN’s WDRP FAQ page (http://www.icann.org/whois/wdrp-registrant-faq.htm) in your WDRP notices. This page was created to answer the most commonly-asked registrant questions and hopefully minimize any registrant confusion that may arise.
And speaking of registrant confusion, in our 2005 Report on the Implementation of the Whois Data Reminder Policy, ICANN recommended that registrars and resellers not send WDRP notices from “icann@” email addresses. Although we appreciate the effort to explain to registrants that the WDRP is a mandatory ICANN policy, we have found that use of such addresses tends to create user confusion - particularly in relation to suspicion about phishing attacks.
As always, if you have questions about the WDRP, the survey/audit, or any other compliance matter, please feel free to contact ICANN’s registrar liaison team. We’re here for you!