At 02:06 PM 1/21/98 +0100, Marcel Schneider wrote:
...
- in the ntld doc you should mention rfc1591 and that iana and ntlds should work according to this rfc (in regards to transfer of ownership, etc.) - I think a set of docs need to be created by the ntld WG for any nTLD that is sued. IL has just been sued in the Supreme Court by a cybersquatter. An excellent resource used to be: http://www.digidem.com/legal/domain.html which compares many policies of ntlds - but we need to have something that continues to be maintained. When someone dislikes your authority in your country over your ntld - they will sue you and not iana. For that we need to be prepared.
Hank Nussbacher's comment is certainly valid. Please refer to the famous Haiti case:
http://www.mids.org/mn/712/reht.html
I am in complete agreement with John Quarterman's remark at the end of above article:
"Perhaps regional NICs such as RIPE <URL:http://www.ripe.net/> in Europe and APNIC <URL:http://www.apnic.net/> in Asia Pacific, probably plus the eventual African and ALyC NICs, should consider going further than just funding IANA and assigning IP address space, and proceed to devolve more IANA functions to the regional level."
RIPE CENTR could be the body to handle all nTLD matters within the territory of RIPE. Distributed, decentralized authority. In accordance with DNS and IP/AS number assignment.
How would the RIPE CENTR be any benefit from a legal standpoint? Someone will come forward and say "What gov't or treaty organization granted you authority?" RIPE CENTR would say IANA and we are back to square one. If IANA can attain some legal status that would help us. I have scanned most english rules for domains in Europe. Only Finland has its rules according to the gov't. All the rest are NICs and academic organizations that put together rules (there may be others that will have gov't legalized rules in the future - but so far only Finland has taken that step - and they even mention IANA!) If the RIPE CENTR is to be of any benefit it first has to have some major legal standing and not just our consensus (meaning those on this list). -Hank
Marcel
-------- Logged at Thu Jan 22 00:19:09 MET 1998 ---------