This is an interesting discussion by the FTC enforcement staff about their travails
in investigating consumer fraud. It makes the point that the FTC investigatory staff's
lives might be a little easier if DNS service providers and their customers would
just cooperate in turning the customer databases into an authenticated investigatory
system for the FTC - at the time and expense of service providers and customers.What
they fail to address, however, is whether such a "investigatory system" would actually
achieve that end - in view of the relative ease of fraud perpetrators to evade any
reasonable controls. They also fail to consider at all the costs, and the appropriateness
of shifting the burden onto providers and customers for their investigatory database.
Lastly, and most importantly, they fail to deal with the bases by which government
(or anyone else for that matter) even lawfully imposes these kinds of requirements
onto those maintaining private systems for creating name expressions for their own
computer systems. Internet users have the right to name their computer systems
and remain anonymous if they so choose.
If one needed a driver's license
to use one's own computer, this scheme might just be feasible. Until that occurs,
the FTC proposition has no merit in policy or law. This is an impermissibly
wide enforcement net to cast under our system of freedom of expression.