OVH is an ICANN-accredited French registrar which accepted the ICANN 2009 RAA (Registrar Accreditation Agreement).

Being a registrar implies understanding and applying a lot of rules, especially when dealing with domain names transfers.

For example domain name transfers policies defines how the losing registrar and winning registrar must act. Part 3 is especially interesting as it states reasons why a losing registrar can or cannot deny an outgoing transfer.

Allowed reasons to deny a transfer includes:

1. Evidence of fraud
2. UDRP action (Unified Domain-name Dispute Resolution Policy)
3. Court order by a court of competent jurisdiction
4. Dispute over the identity of the domain name owner
5. No payment for previous registration period
6. Express written objection to the transfer from the Transfer Contact (email, fax, paper document, etc)
7. The domain is locked (only acceptable if registrar provides a mean to remove lock status)
8. The domain is too young (must be at least 60 days old before transfer)
9. Domain has been transferred in the last 60 days (or less, up to the registrar)

Any other reason is not acceptable, especially:

• Non-payment for a pending or future registration period
• No response from the Registered Name Holder or Administrative Contact
• Domain is locked (unless is is possible to unlock it)
• Domain time constraints (except those stated before)
• General payment default for other services

Our friends at OVH decided to provide extra protection (aren’t they just trying to prevent customer from going elsewhere?) to domain owners, and add a transfer page to authorize outgoing transfers. When transferring from OVH to somewhere else, the contacts are required to accept the transfer on a specific page. Not accepting the transfer within 48 hours means the transfer won’t happen (at least that’s what the page itself says).

• This is not allowed by ICANN. Even worse since this is explicitly forbidden.
• This stupid page takes up to 20 seconds to appear, timings from the OVH network itself confirms it
• It also contains a stupid CAPTCHA which in turn also takes up to 20 seconds to appear
• For some TLDs (tested with .fr ccTLD) OVH does not apply this procedure, so why only for gTLD ? (tested with .com .net .org .info)

Of course, I first tried to contact the OVH support, by mail, phone and even writing to Octave (the OVH CEO).

Phone attempt was of course useless (“please contact support by mail, ok I’ll tell the administrator too”  but nothing has happened), mail support proven to be even more useless, and Octave didn’t reply.

Mail support timeline:

• 2009-11-25 00:50:12: Support initial contact explaining outgoing confirmation page is slow
• 2009-11-28 11:18:48: Support replies asking “which domain is concerned?”
• 2009-11-28 11:54:53: Reply to support with list of all domains and explicitly says “All domains I am about to transfer from OVH”
• 2009-11-30 11:06:01: Reply from support “your problem is related to the display time of the tranfer to OVH order page, if you want we can generate the order for you”

The last solution was to contact ICANN, which is now done. Let’s see how this problem will resolve, however I won’t fight with this transfer page unless I’m on a transfer that *must* happen. Let’s see how OVH will justify denying the transfer in the even no reply comes from the domain contacts…

Tags: Domain, Domain transfer, ICANN, OVH, Registrar