Re: Question about root domains

["Martin B. Schwimmer" <martys@interport.net>]

As an aside to this discussion about intended uses for root domains, I
note, as these lists are aware, that last week NSI registered on behalf of
ICANN, the domain names icann.com, icann.net and icann.org, several days
ahead of the public announcement of the selection of the name by IANA and
NSI.  It did so in those three TLDs to avoid the cyber-piracy problem.

Now I don't fault ICANN for taking out all three, and in fact I encourage
them to take out ICANN.[__} and every possible misspelling of ICANN in all
ccTLDS and in all future undifferentiated TLDs.

Of course as ICANN is to be a not-for-profit entity the icann.com
registration would seem to contradict the guidelines (they are referred to
as guidelines, not rules in the RFC) but if you go to the FAQs on the
Internic site http://www.internic.net/faq/tld.html, you will see that:


"NSI originally tried to follow these guidelines as closely as possible.
This required manual processing of all requests to identify the type of
organization requesting each name. This worked fine when the registration
request volume was small, but it became an operational and customer service
problem as requests began to rapidly increase. This first happened in the
.COM TLD and later in the .NET and .ORG TLDs. 

The manual process not only resulted in slow customer service, but also
created several other problems. Registrants, who were dishonest in
describing their organization type, were rewarded with a registration while
those who honestly reported their type of organization were denied if they
did not meet RFC 1591 guidelines. Also, it became increasingly difficult to
clearly define what a network or nonprofit organization was. The definition
of Internet Service Provider (ISP), which was initially one category that
qualified a company for a .NET name, became increasingly blurred. And the
definition of nonprofit was complicated by the international nature of the
Internet. Moreover, to implement processes to reliably validate
organization types would have been extremely costly and still not fool
proof." 

This FAQ illustrates NSI's tendency of not enforcing a procedure if NSI
says that enforcing a procedure is difficult (or that has the effect of
doing anything to slow down the number of domains it could register during
its tenure).  Requiring that registrants give real contact info is another
example of something that is too difficult.  

Of course the stated rationale for NSI's decision not to enforce the TLD
guidelines is third-party dishonesty, which would not apply in this situation.

As stated above, NSI did the rational thing in registering icann.com and in
so doing, it showed greated foresight than some of the other recent cases
of names being pirated the days they are announced (without naming names I
refer to a certain large merger involving a bank and an insurance company).  

However the fact that it needed to do so illustrates the fact that NSI's
adminstration of the gTLDs have culminated in an environment where it is
rational for the adminstrator of the process to blatantly disregard its own
process.





At 03:20 PM 9/24/98 -0600, you wrote:
>At 03:35 PM 9/24/98 -0500, Scott Dexter wrote:
>>Where can I find information describing the intended use(s) and enforcement
>>(if any) for registering in the root domains .com, .org, .edu, .net, and
>>.gov?
>
>Used to be you could take RFC 1591 ( ftp://rs.internic.net/rfc/rfc1591.txt
>) as authoritative.  NSI itself cites RFC 1591 as authoritative when it
>suits its purposes ( like explaining to somebody why it refuses to give
>them an EDU domain ), and ignores it when it doesn't.