Re: [alac] Network Solutions Private Registrations

["John R Levine" <johnl@xxxxxxxx>]

> I was doing a whois lookup and noticed this in the contact
> information.   In particular, the bottom part requiring contact by
> express or certified mail seemed odd, if not strictly inconsistent
> with ICANN requirements.

Yes, and this is the same Network Solutions who recently gave some random
guy on the phone enough info about hushmail.com's registration that they
were able to redirect its DNS to a hack site.  Lawsuit pending.

For comparison, Tucows will be rolling out their private registration
service next week which works roughly the same way.  They say:

How the Service Works:

  When WHOIS Privacy is purchased for a domain name, funds in the
  OpenSRS account are placed on hold and a confirmation email is sent
  to the domain's admin contact. The contact has 10 days to confirm
  the purchase, or the funds will be released and the service will not
  be enabled.

  Once confirmed, the domain's information is changed to that of the
  Tucows WHOIS Privacy Service (see 'Record Information' below).

  All inquiries for the WHOIS information of a protected domain that
  are sent via telephone or email are directed to visit a web-based
  request form. Inquiries sent by registered mail are scanned by Tucows,
  then forwarded to the Registrant via email.

  Requests are then sent to the Registrant, who is free to respond to
  or ignore the inquiry.

Tucows is in Canada, where there's no such thing as certified mail, so
it looks like they're using the same rules.  It does seem rather
peculiar only to accept mail that's has an extra eight dollar stamp,
but where does it say that registrants have to read their mail at all?

Incidentally, Tucows only charges 17 cents/mo, so they clearly don't
expect this to be a lot of work.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@xxxxxxxx, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Mayor
"I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.