A few years ago, Rick Wesson testified before the House Judiciary Committee. He stated: "Beginning in 2000, I spent the next 18 months developing a technology to perform fraud analysis on electronic commerce transactions with the intent of solving registrars’ Whois data accuracy problems. The technology we developed was specifically targeted to identify invalid and undeliverable postal address, undeliverable e-mail address, and nondialable telephone numbers. We launched the service Fraudit, as in "Fraud-Audit", for registrars to increase their data accuracy at the 2002 ICANN meeting in Shanghai, China. To our surprise registrars were somewhat angered to learn that someone had come up with a solution to the Whois data accuracy problem. Registrars appeared to believe that as long as no solution existed, there was no good reason audit their registrant data. In fact the only time they preformed self-audits is when the registrar was faced with a financial loss. Registrars have been hit hard with credit card fraud. One large registrar had a rather embarrassing incident by nearly losing their merchant account, removing their ability to take credit cards over the Internet, because of fraud. Although all registrars experience some credit card fraud and most have invested in mitigating that risk, they have not attempted, nor invested in, an ability to prevent the introduction of fraudulent registrant data – as long as the domain is paid for and the registrar is not hit with a credit card charge back there is no business reason to prevent invalid registrant data in the Whois system. My ultimate realization that ICANN, gTLD registries and accredited registrars had no intention, desire, or incentive to audit their registrant data caused us to withdraw the product from the registrar Whois accuracy space." http://judiciary.house.gov/HearingTestimony.aspx?ID=124 When I look at the WHOIS results for cocaco1a.com I am angered by the attitude of registrars that are in a position to proactively deal with WHOIS data accuracy issues but refuse to do so (even though the technology is out there that allows for inaccurate records to readily be spotted). I, for one, am sick of the games that are being played by the registrar community. It is time to give the registrars a true incentive to audit their WHOIS records. We need language in the RAA that stipulates an audit process with financial penalties for those that fail to comply with their obligations. Who on the ALAC is handling input into the RAA revision process? __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com