Re: First come/First served

[pb@fasterix.freenix.fr (Pierre Beyssac)]

Michael Dillon writes:
> We don't need domain names to be authenticated; we just need a guaranteed
> way to find the real-world identity of the domain owner. IMHO the IAHC
> would do well to address the issue of bogus contact email addresses and
> P.O. Box addresses. 

Could you elaborate on that, please? i.e. I fail to see why it is
necessary to do this via postal mail.

Domains don't exist out of thin air: they are hosted somewhere, on
a physical machine at a physical location on a physical network.
The network owner can generally be identified through his IP
provider. The network owner can in turn easily determine the owner
of the machine the domain (DNS server) is hosted on. etc. In short,
maybe it would be enough to identify network owners.

> It's not to much to demand that every domain owner must supply a working
> set of two email addresses, one for an admin contact and one for a tech
> contact, and if either address fails to operate for a significant period
> the domain should be put on hold automatically.

I agree about this.

> And it's not too much to demand that the so-called mailing address for a 
> domain be an actual physical location where a warrant or other legal
> document can be served if need be, not a P.O. Box address. If this means
> that registries need to maintain separate mailing address and legal
> address, then so be it. If this means that a registry cannot register
> a domain without some real-world proof of identity then so be it.

Looks like a North-American-centric point of view to me. How can
you reliably check the identity of users in hundreds of countries?

Maybe there is a simple solution: in case there is a billing for
the domain, can't the payment constitute some kind of a
internationally-accepted proof (I am not a lawyer)? From there, it
might be easy to track back the identity of the owner, if the need
arises.
-- 
Pierre Beyssac	    pb@fasterix.frmug.fr.net pb@fasterix.freenix.fr
{Free,Net,Open}BSD, Linux : il y a moins bien, mais c'est plus cher
    Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager@EU.org