On Friday I posted a bit about how to empower registrants by giving them more information about the status of their domain name - the economic status - so as to ensure that they get a fair shake in the expiring names market. Today, registrants are forced to either a) maintain a registration that they would otherwise let expire in the hopes that someone who might want it stumbles across it or b) let the name expire into the batch pool dropped names games where someone else gets to reap the economic value of the name.

"Perfect Information" describes how the entire market can operate more efficiently and share the revenue associated with expiring names more "fairly". Today we announced Tucows expiring names auction service, a local implementation of the Perfect Information proposal (PIP?). What I mean is that it only realizes the efficiencies described in "Perfect Information" on a very local basis - i.e. it only works for names registered with Tucows. Because it is a "local" solution, it also lacks a few features that we set forth in "Perfect Information". For instance, it doesn't solve 100% of the problems faced by the registry and it doesn't properly acknowledge the competitive ESP market.

These are very important aspects of the Perfect Information proposal that will only come about if *all* registrars can operate under a reasonably standard set of rules in a unified marketplace.We don't have this today, but hopefully we will over time. In the meantime, Tucows auction service is our attempt to capitalize on some of the dynamics we recognize in the space while we work with the rest of the community on trying to sorting out the various moving parts that have to come into place before a global solution is realized.