I contacted the Gandi support. According to them, the NIC.at registrar doesn't allow them to break the contract on my behalf. They also say that this practice is unique to this TLD.
I work at a Dutch registrar and we have monitored .at terminations in the past years due to this issue and making sure contracts get terminated. Since recently we are able to delete a domain for our customers through EPP so our customers don't have these problems after terminatin their contract.
The blame should go squarely to NIC.at. A long time ago we registered a domain for my fraternity, a registered legal entity in Austria, and it was refused by NIC.at on the grounds that such a thing does not exist. A silly thing to do facing an organization with a hundred lawyers as members and some threats got them to reverse their stance but they act like the worst kind of government employee, enjoying their ill-gotten profits from a namespace monopoly in true honey badger style.
No, Gandi doesn't have to just do nothing to warn you and let you sort it out afterwards.
They have at least two options upfront:
- Do what the other large international registrars do: give a fuck about the rules and just cancel the domain.
- Actually tell the customer two months before and get them to explicitly cancel the domain.
Or, option three: do nothing and just 'billwithdraw' the domain (this is what gives the domain back to nic.at to handle the renewal), causing lots of pain for the customer.
Not saying that the AT rules are super great, but most of the blame really is on Gandi here.
Just got another support response. Gandi told me that they now work around that issue properly so that the user doesn't get annoyed by NIC.at's policy.