Quoting Lucian Daniel Kafka on Monday September 15, 2003:
| 
| How do we unify ROIDs and NICs between registrars (and within the same 
| registrar)?
| 
| Is there anyone who believes this is not a good thing? Anyone seeing any 
| solutions?

It should be possible to unify contact objects ('ROIDs') within a
registrar, but that is up to their system.

The reason given why pre-competition "NIC handles" were devolved into
many contact objects in the first place was to allow easy transfer
between registrars after go-live, because ROIDs are tied to a registrar
by the protocol.

If a multitude ROIDs are masked behind a higher level construct such as
a "customer account" that allows you to perform bulk operations on the
contacts then I dont see how ROID handling really matters.

I remember fondly my "KD194" and "KD6-AU" and the ease of changing
things. But to be honest it is just as easy now with some gTLD
registrars to do the same thing with a simple web interface. The
database structure behind is irrelevant.

To take another gTLD example, I was bestowed with some extra domain
names a few months ago with Network Solutions. I got an automatic email
from them letting me know I could consolidate my contact objects if I
wanted. This was only really an issue because they stay true to the
concept of contact objects and do not abstract them. But I followed
their email and it merged about 16 of the things into 1.

For what it is worth, it is currently impossible to have contact objects
span multiple registrars as far as I know, so that kind of consolidation
can't happen. The issue of unifying accounts across multiple registrars
would affect a realtively minor number of people I suspect.

kim