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The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office just granted a new patent number (10,581,799) to GoDaddy regarding a “Method for a losing registrar to transfer a domain name from the losing registrar to a gaining registrar”, reported DomainNameWire.
A New Patent Number Granted to GoDaddy
According to the document, “a registrant, after registering a domain name at a losing registrar, may request at a gaining registrar that the domain name be transferred to the gaining registrar. The gaining registrar may verify that the domain name is registered to the registrant, available for transfer and the person requesting the transfer is in fact the registrant.”
In other words, the new GoDaddy’s patent construes a frame for individuals to transfer domain names to a new (winning) registrar without the need to log in to the old (losing) registrar. This automatically eliminates the use of authorization codes, also called AuthCodes, in favor of registrant data verification.
What is an AuthCode? An Auth-Code, also known as transfer code, is a code created by a registrar to help identify the domain name holder, or the registrant of a domain name in a generic top-level domain (gTLD) operated under contract with ICANN.
Prior to this change, a customer needs to log into their account at the losing registrar to request an AuthCode before proceeding with the transfer of a domain name. An AuthCode should be provided to the winning registrar.
However, the new patent allows the winning registrar to verify the owner’s details instead of using the AuthCode.
The winning registrar would need to validate the information in Whois. This could be done via a verification sent to the email address, or an SMS verification to the phone number in Whois. Instead of using Whois, the winning registrar could ping the losing one, which would reassure the contact information to be validated.
Despite being a new patent, this is reminiscent of the time when sending an email to the contact in Whois was needed for a transfer.
“The process would not override transfer locks, so registrants would need to log in at the losing domain name registrar to remove these if they are in place,” says DomainNameWire.
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