Hello William,
We know how to do 3-way handshakes. Rather a fundamental of the Internet. So quickly folks forget....
We knew in advance that the VRSN/NetSol/whatever protocol was terrible, and that the ICANN policy change was not going to be helpful.
The ICANN policy change had no impact on this particular incident. As the incident has been documented so far, the transfer would have occurred under both the old and the new policy. With respect to the protocol. An IETF process was used to develop the EPP protocol as a replacement for RRP. With respect to notifications of transfers, the new protocol handles this by a message queue at the registry. (ie email is no longer the mechanism). It might be useful to consider reviewing the protocol to ensure that a transfer cannot proceed unless the losing registrar system confirms receipt of the transfer request. Regards, Bruce