Congrats to the good fighters at ICANN, who have won an important battle today that makes it easier to transfer your domain from one registrar to another without risking losing it in the process (my last two Network Solutions registrations ran out this month and they're now safely ensconsed with the good people at Tucows/DomainDirect, who are my absolute favourite registrars). Ross calls this the Emancipation Proclamation for domain-owners, and he's not far wrong.
* streamlined definition of responsibilities as it relates to the management of the domain name. Under the new policy, only the Administrative Contact or Registrant can authorize a domain name transfer to a new service provider. This was extremely unclear in the old policy and led to a lot of abuse and confusion.
* minimizing Registrar gaming and abuse. Under the old policy, it was quite common for unseemly Registrars to abuse their position and prevent outgoing customers from transferring to a different service provider.
* introduction of arbitration. The new policy includes several policies designed to "fix" problems before they are taken to the courts. The old policy didn't make it easy to fix problems and often relied on the good graces of usually uncooperative policies. The new policies fix this by introducing undo procedures and a dispute resolution process designed to make it fairly easy and relatively inexpensive for Registrants and Registrars to fix problematic transfers.
