I'ld like to give input as requested on this topic. For the TLD people who may have missed the DB session, here is first a brief description of how the referral feature works. I don't know the details at this stage. When a request is received by the "central" server for a domain object marked (locally) for referral, the query is referred to the authoritative server and the data from the authoritative server is returned to the client. If the domain object requested is not found on the "central" server, the specified domain name is truncated (successively, if necessary ?) until a higher-level domain is found to be marked for referral, and the query is then referred to the authoritative server for that (higher-level) domain. The following suggestions seem to be almost agreed, but need to be written down. By default, the response returned to the client for a referred query should include the following elements: Alert that referral has been used Response from authoritative server I expect that the authoritative response will include a copyright and/or AUP banner from the authoritative server, but this is the responsibility of the authoritative registry, and not of the registry providing the referring server. I expect that a 'verbose mode' will provide a response including the following elements: Response from referring server as if no referral was used, including referring registry's standard (C)/AUP banner Alert that referral is spin effect for the domain in question Response from authoritative server Whichever of the modes described above is used, it should be possible to specify whether recursive lookup and display of related person/role (and in future, nameserver) objects is to be done. IHTH, Niall