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
