Re: Billing information and EPP/GRRP-REQ

[Klaus Malorny <Klaus.Malorny@knipp.de>]

"Hollenbeck, Scott" wrote:


> I'd certainly prefer to keep registry-specific billing details out of the
> protocol.  If they have to be in there anywhere a registry could do whatever
> it wants in the <unspec> elements.  If you have a proposal in mind, though,
> please post it to the list to present a more complete picture and to gather
> other opinions.
> 
> <Scott/>.


Hi Scott,

sorry for not answering earlier, but I'm quite busy these days, so I had not
much time.

My original idea was to add some general accounting information to each
request, at least a serial number (I would have called it transaction number
if there wouldn't be a chance to be confused with other transaction IDs) and
the amount either deducted or credited. The serial number is used to keep
track/synchronize with invoices received by other means, i.e., not to book a
certain item twice. Well, additional fields could contain the account number
and a description field, which holds the cause of the posting.

There is of course a problem: Some costs may be generated outside of the
requests, e.g. a registry may decide to have an auto-renewal mechanism (like
the .DE registry on a monthly base), or the gaining registrar does not have to
pay the fees before the loosing registrar accepts the transfer. So there may
be no chance to report it immediately together with the response. One way
would be to report these costs via a poll, but I fear that either the number
or the sizes of the responses could be too much. Another way would be to keep
the records at the registry and report them on the next request to the object.

Please let me add the following to the background of my questions: Many
registrars have or will have resellers, and these resellers also may have
resellers and so on. Due to bad experiences, many registrars and resellers
require prepayment for bulk domain registrations. To keep track how much of
the payed money has been eaten up, it would be helpful to have immediate
feedback from the registry about the costs of a request and therefore be able
to block requests from a certain customer if necessary. Since a registrar may
bill his customers different to the way he is billed, it may also be suitable
to have more abstract accounting information, e.g. on a delete request: "you
have been charged for X registration periods".


regards,

Klaus Malorny


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