Logo
ICANN
ICANN
Filtered Search

Are you sure you want to sign out from http://www.icann.org?

If you want to sign out from both http://www.icann.org and ICANN Account, click here.

ICANN Blogs

Read ICANN Blogs to stay informed of the latest policymaking activities, regional events, and more.

ICANN Board Approves RDAP Amendments

4 May 2023
By
Theresa Swinehart

Theresa Swinehart

SVP, Global Domains & Strategy

Theresa Swinehart is the Senior Vice President of Global Domains and Strategy. In this role, she works with the community, contracted parties, stakeholders, and policymakers to ensure broad and inclusive engagement, consensus-based policymaking through ICANN’s multistakeholder model, and effective, accountable policy implementation. Her responsibilities include policy implementation, review operation, and cross-functional strategic initiatives such as ICANN’s compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. An expert in global Internet governance, Theresa also serves as co-deputy to the President and CEO. Her extensive industry experience, including nearly 20 years as a key contributor to ICANN’s growth and development, gives her a valuable perspective on how ICANN organization can work efficiently and collaboratively to better serve the global Internet community.

Theresa rejoined ICANN after three years as Executive Director of Global Internet Policy at Verizon Communications, where she specialized in emerging issues as well as stakeholder and policy engagement. Prior to this, she served as ICANN’s Vice President of Global and Strategic Partnerships, leading a team responsible for partnership reform, global engagement and outreach, and the participation in international forums. Before ICANN, Theresa was Director of Global E-Commerce at MCI, where she was responsible for such issues as Internet service provider liability, data protection, and participation in Internet-related forums, including the formation of ICANN. 

Theresa has a bachelor’s degree in international relations from the University of California, Davis, a graduate degree in international studies from the University of Vienna, Austria, and a juris doctorate from American University. She served on the Internet Society’s Board of Trustees and Internet Governance Forum’s Multistakeholder Advisory Committee. Theresa began her career in international human rights. She is fluent in German and is conversant in French.

At the 30 April 2023 Board Meeting, the ICANN Board of Directors adopted a resolution directing the ICANN organization (org) to implement the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) Global Amendments to the Base Generic Top-level Domain (gTLD) Registry Agreement (RA), Specification 13 of the Base gTLD RA, and 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA). The global amendments specify operational requirements for providing Registration Data Directory Services (RDDS) via RDAP and detail the sunset of certain obligations for registries and registrars to provide RDDS via the WHOIS protocol by 28 January 2025.

The adoption of this resolution marks an important milestone in ICANN's commitment to the Internet community to improve the WHOIS system by updating the underlying technology with the more secure and capable RDAP. Internet users now will have access to improved and more user-friendly tools to conduct queries for public domain name registration data, much like the publicly available ICANN Lookup Tool.

Access to public registration data information is an important part of maintaining a robust Internet ecosystem. It not only improves registrant accountability, it also provides important information that is needed for reporting technical issues or abuse practices related to a specific domain name or Internet Protocol address.

The RDAP protocol, developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force, makes access to registration data more secure and provides many advantages over the WHOIS protocol. These benefits include standardized queries, secure access to data, extensibility, differentiated access, support for internationalization of registration data, and the ability to search for objects. The scalable technical architecture also will accommodate any new and future policy-driven functionality requirements.

In adopting this resolution, the ICANN Board carefully reviewed the proposed changes to the RA, Specification 13, and the RAA that were negotiated by ICANN org and the Contracted Party House Negotiating Team, made up of members of the gTLD Registries Stakeholder Group and Registrars Stakeholder Group. It also took into account the Public Comment proceeding and the contracted party voting results. The ICANN Board is confident that the global amendments adequately clarify what is contractually required, and will lead to a better registration data query experience for contracted parties and the public.

More information on RDAP is available on the RDAP page.

Authors

Theresa Swinehart

Theresa Swinehart

SVP, Global Domains & Strategy
Theresa Swinehart

Theresa Swinehart

SVP, Global Domains & Strategy

Theresa Swinehart is the Senior Vice President of Global Domains and Strategy. In this role, she works with the community, contracted parties, stakeholders, and policymakers to ensure broad and inclusive engagement, consensus-based policymaking through ICANN’s multistakeholder model, and effective, accountable policy implementation. Her responsibilities include policy implementation, review operation, and cross-functional strategic initiatives such as ICANN’s compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. An expert in global Internet governance, Theresa also serves as co-deputy to the President and CEO. Her extensive industry experience, including nearly 20 years as a key contributor to ICANN’s growth and development, gives her a valuable perspective on how ICANN organization can work efficiently and collaboratively to better serve the global Internet community.

Theresa rejoined ICANN after three years as Executive Director of Global Internet Policy at Verizon Communications, where she specialized in emerging issues as well as stakeholder and policy engagement. Prior to this, she served as ICANN’s Vice President of Global and Strategic Partnerships, leading a team responsible for partnership reform, global engagement and outreach, and the participation in international forums. Before ICANN, Theresa was Director of Global E-Commerce at MCI, where she was responsible for such issues as Internet service provider liability, data protection, and participation in Internet-related forums, including the formation of ICANN. 

Theresa has a bachelor’s degree in international relations from the University of California, Davis, a graduate degree in international studies from the University of Vienna, Austria, and a juris doctorate from American University. She served on the Internet Society’s Board of Trustees and Internet Governance Forum’s Multistakeholder Advisory Committee. Theresa began her career in international human rights. She is fluent in German and is conversant in French.

You May Also Like