On 22 December 2010 13:11, Avri Doria <avri@acm.org> wrote:
So all the avenues for knowing who you are dealing wit exist as long as the proper processes of the law are used.
Whose law? We already appear to have situations in which the bad guys go jurisdiction-shopping -- either by design or fortune -- to find regimes that offer the most obstacles to discovery and/or have the narrowest definition of fraud. It's the fraudsters' equivalent of incorporating in Delaware or banking in the Caymans. When the victim has to pursue the perp across national boundaries, only to find that in the bad guy's "home" victim claims have little value, "proper processes" are a cruel joke. (And heaven knows this isn't just related to Internet matters...) A big part of the problem I had with the IRT approach to trademark protection is that it sought to confer upon ICANN nearly treaty-making authority it did not (and should not) have. While ICANN can go a long way towards cleaning up the loopholes and enforcing its own agreements, it can't on its own redefine Internet fraud on a global basis. We now have precedent, for better or worse, for blocking domains at a national level. An American court order against scammer.su (or even scammer.com) might not be enforceable against a foreign registrar and foreign proxy, but those domains can be blocked by government order. You may not be able to catch the elusive bad guys but you can at least close down the local office. And now that the action has been taken once with minimal public outcry, I expect other actions -- and possibly other countries following suit. What role does ICANN have in this? Except for issues of WHOIS accuracy and enforcing its own contracts, this may be beyond scope. But ICANN has an interest, as a matter of Internet stability, in minimizing country-level blockage of domains. To that end it may have a valuable role as facilitator and advisor, where it is unable to act as regulator. Perhaps this is an opportunity for ICANN to turn the table and provide advice to governments -- or at least offer a forum where these issues can be discussed without being based on technical ignorance. Meanwhile, internally ICANN needs to clean up its WHOIS act. As Bill said, it is not vigilante justice just to know who owns a domain. -- - Evan