Industry executives said reasons why companies were pushing the registration transfer could include the desire to consolidate their business relationship to a minimum number of registrars, with the possibility of additional commission for the transfer.
The .au Domain Administration Code of Practice Committee said it was revising its code of practice to eliminate resellers' ability to claim the transfer was a 'technical' requirement, forcing them instead to justify it to their customers on business grounds.
Jo Lim, the chief policy officer at auDA (au Domain Administration) told ZDNet Australia that an additional clause was added to paragraph 5.5 of the code, which deals with the conditions by which a domain name supplier must abide when offering customers their services.
The new clause requires companies to spell out that their domain name licence offering is independent of associated services, such as Web hosting, or e-mail services.
Some resellers, including Telstra, have been accused of saying to customers that it is a technical requirement to have the domain name licence located with the reseller's registrar of choice. That domain name is then allocated back to the reseller for use in hosting the customer's Web pages.
"[The move] wasn't necessarily aimed at Telstra, but it was aimed at a practice that Telstra was doing," Larry Bloch, chief executive officer of one registrar, NetRegistry, told ZDNet Australia.
The issue was raised in a submission, who wrote: "We have seen a substantial number of incidences where domain name registrants are being forced to transfer their domain name to a different registrar at the time they select a provider for Web site hosting or e-mail services."
"One benefit of a competitive market of registrars is that a registrant can maintain their domain name (which is in effect a pointer to an Internet location) independently of the provider of their email or web hosting services," continues the submission.
The Committee will reconvene to review the Code of Practice in June 2003.
Telstra was contacted for this article but failed to respond by time of publication.
