North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: ICANN - The Case for Replacing its Management

  • From: Vadim Antonov
  • Date: Tue Feb 26 04:40:16 2002

 
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