On Mon, 25 Feb 2002, Patrick wrote:
P.S. Yes Virgina, the resultant outcome of this mess could actually affect how you configure your router(s) some day....
Which leads me to ask again why large ISPs are taking such passive position? They are the only party with resources, expertise, long history of cooperation, huge interest in keeping Internet stable, and, finally, the power to direct traffic to whatever root nameservers they choose (even if it means injecting few host routes in their BGP tables). A self-appointed "governance" bodies, frankly, have no business in deciding how Internet should be ran. They got no interest in it but as means for self-perpetuating. The whole registration & name allocation process can be completely automated, and very cheap. The silly dispute-resoultion policies are not, in fact, needed if few rules are enforced automatically: 1) first-come first-served registration 2) credit-card payment _only_, with payer's address in the country of the domain, and issued by a bank accredited in the country. 3) publishing of verified payer information (i.e. credit card holder's name and address) 4) exponential fee increments for registering domains with the same payer's physical address and/or name. 5) voluntary re-assignment of domain names. 6) forced reassignment of domain names if owner on record fails to respond to (rate-limited) dispute notifications made by any party through the registry's system. Such responces must include re-validation of payer's name & address (using the credit cards, again). 7) periodic automatic renewal, with e-mail notifications. It is responsibility of the domain holder to keep contact information up to date. The rule 1 is the basic algorithm. The rules 2 and 3 validate contact information and point to a real person or registered corporation, so they can be easily traced down if a dispute arises. Perpetuating "international" TLDs like .COM makes no sense whatsoever; existing foreighn domain name holders may have a grace period to migrate to national domains or to secure a credit card for payment in US. This problem does not exist with ISO-3166 domains. The rule 4 is, obviously, designed to take care of squatters. They can get only as many credit cards with different addresses before triggering alarms of financial supervision bodies. The rule 5 is the usual method of ending a dispute. An appropriate court of law (they know their jurisdictions, and have methods of resolving jurisdictional disputes) issues a transfer order, and the old domain holder complies with the order. If he doesn't this is a contempt of court, and the state has means to enforce futher compliance. One of the recourses against unreacheable parties is invalidation of their payment instruments (i.e. credit cards). The rule 6 takes care of reassignment of dormant domains and non-cooperating unreacheable parties (following court-ordered of invalidation of their payment instruments). Because such invalidation is carried out in the same country as the registry, and registry accepts only payments with instruments issued by banks in the same national jurisdiction, the national courts can take effective measures to force payment-based validation to fail. The rule 7 is also quite obvious. None of those rules require any manual processing or registry's involvement in the dispute resolution. By the virtue of being automatic, they also strengthen registry's protection from liability claims (i.e. registry does not make decisions who should own what while providing a method of recourse through existing legal system). --vadim