offcial notices

[Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>]

On Sun, 29 Dec 1996, Vince Wolodkin wrote:

> I didn't make myself clear.  My 60 day period is NOT a waiting period. 
> The applicant gets the domain from day one.  I indicated a 60 day
> publication period,

There is no such thing as a 60-day publication period. Once something has
been published it is published forever. 

> Also, you cannot prod the legal and business world away
> from print notices.  Not everyone has internet access, but there are
> accepted standards for public notification using the standard press.  I
> don't believe these standards exist for internet publication.  I doubt
> seriously that the internet is anywhere near ready to supplant the
> printed page.  Not even close.

In the case of a notice that a new domain name has been created, the
Internet is the only logical place to publish such a notice. Paper is
totally unneccesary.

Many of you may not be aware that many governments publish a daily listing
of activities often called a "gazette". This includes things like new
incorporations, corporate name changes, corporations being struck from the
register, divorces, people who have changed their names, judgements in
small claims court and similar things.

There is no reason why CORE could not publish a similar daily register.
It would contain notices of new domain names created, changes to domain 
name information, and domain names removed. The gazette could be published
as a plain text file in a format that can be unambigously parsed by
machine so that anyone who wishes can treat it as a stream of transactions
to update their own private copy of the domain names database which they
can use to do their own searches.

Publications on paper have three key characteristics that must be
maintained.

1. They are public. This means that the daily gazette must be available
   to anyone without restriction.

2. One can subscribe to a publication and it will be sent to you. This
   can be achieved by setting up a mailing list and emailing the gazette
   to all subscribers every day. Since the information is public, anyone
   can reformat the info to something that looks more pleasing to
   humans and publish a paper version. But the official version will
   remain the original text file.

3. One can look up back issues of a publication in a reference library
   or obtain copies as they are published by asking a magazine seller
   for them. This can be achieved by making the same daily gazette
   text file availble at a website. If the URL is predictable
   such as http://www.iahc.org/gazette/1997/0122.txt then a person
   can easily request a back issue or even the current day's issue. 
   No doubt some people will wish to build their own tools that request
   the daily gazette via the web URL rather than wait for the email
   version to show up. 

Note that all these publication methods share one single overriding
characteristic. Once the material is published, it is published forever.
I suppose the website maintainers could diligently delete the gazette
files after 60 days but I can see no purpose behind this since it would
only mean that others who received copies of the gazette files would make
them available on their own websites.

Michael Dillon                   -               Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael@memra.com