Neil Schwartzman wrote, On 7/4/09 15:15:
Your argument is a strawman, I too do not advocate ICANN's indiscriminate involvement in take-downs because a site collects data in an insecure manner, or due to an erroneous postal code, and I don't know anyone who advocates for such things.
There is a role to be played in some particularly egregious situations, and in fact, all roads lead to Rome. There are, in some cases, no-where else to turn BUT ICANN.
What we have seen in the one case of a shut-down last year was particularly unsatisfying, when the assets of Registrar owned by a criminal were sold to his business associate.
I'm sure ICANN can do better, and certainly from those whom i met in Mexico, I got the impression that there is political will to do so.
The main issue I see is that many of the terms in ICANN contracts, and in this case the RAA terms which refer to whois data, would not stand a court case. I have some difficulty thinking that a court would rule that a domain name should be taken down because of invalid whois data, especially if it was paid for in a legimimate way. The remedy (take down) seems disproportionate to the sheer value of the registration (less than USD 10 in most cases). After all, you are not being asked for your address details when ordering at McDonalds, which is in the same price range as a gTLD domain name. There is the added issue that the RAA is between the registrar and ICANN. The customer is a third party. Depending on the local legal context, the customer could validly argue that he is not bound by the terms of the RAA. This is yet another example of ICANN drafting rules out of the blue and not testing their validity in the real world. Some would call it arrogance, but I would rather like to think this is idealism in its most naive form. Patrick Vande Walle Check my blog: http://patrick.vande-walle.eu