[wpietri]

That's a good idea, but it would require all the registrars agreeing on a few different protocols and people doing the hard work of implementing them reliably at many, many, many different participants. Since lots of those participants are competitors (e.g., many registrars provide hosting, email service, etc), I think it would be very hard to get enough momentum that places like, say, GoDaddy would feel obligated to participate.

[anderspitman]

It seems like a pretty useful feature one of the big boys could offer to differentiate themselves. Or I could see a new entrant in the domain seller space marketing this as a main feature.

[wpietri]

But it only works if it has significant compliance. If a new entrant offers the service, there's little reason for other places to implement it, because only a tiny percentage of their customers will be using it. And the big boys have a disincentive because they already offer things like email and web hosting. Making it easy for people to buy those services elsewhere will cut in to their revenue.

[anderspitman]

See @matthewaveryusa's comment above[0]. Looks like it already exists and is supported by GoDaddy, Google, CloudFlare, 1and1, and others. Still reading the spec but it looks pretty good.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29575264