Subject: Is is mandatory for an object to belong to a registrar?

From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 Nov 2002 14:04:17 +0100

I suspect that the question is stupid but I nevertheless would like to
clarify things in my mind.

A colleague of me objected to EPP that EPP "mandates all objects to
belong to a registrar (the creator)". Of course, this should be a
local policy: most registries do not bill for contact creation, only
for domain creation, so there is no "hard" reason to make contacts a
property of registrars. But the issue is: is it allowed with EPP?

I believe that yes. A registry can always set a
clientTransferProhibited for all objects and/or can always reply with
2306 to every <transfer> of a contact. (Wether the current EPP
implementations allow it is another matter...)

But I wanted to be sure: a registry where contacts are *not* owned by
registrars (and therefore not transferrable) can use EPP and the
current mappings, yes or no?

---

From: "Hollenbeck, Scott" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2002 07:51:50 -0500

> > The model is one where objects are managed by some client.  
> If you're asking
> > if the <contact:clID> is optional in an <info> response, 
> it's not.  If
> > you're suggesting that it should be, I would disagree.  
> Someone or something
> > has to be the authoritative management agent for an object.
> 
> This is not how all registries work at the present time. For instance,
> in the RIPE-NCC database (an address registry for Europe/MiddleEast),
> every object can have 1 to N "maintainers" and every maintainer has
> full rights over the object. This is very convenient because it
> allows, for instance, a network provider to add its client and itself
> as maintainers of contact objects: each one can make a change of, for
> instance, a phone number.
> 
> True, an object is created by some client but it can be modified by
> several "actors".
> 
> Now, if the RIPE-NCC wants to use the EPP contact mapping, what will
> they put as clID? (The crID will be the creator, a LIR - Local
> Internet Registry, typically a network provider.)=

It would be helpful if you read and quoted the last part of my previous
message -- you can use the server/registry as the "client" if it allows
multiple actors to maintain an object.

-Scott-