At 10:40 +1000 16/7/03, David Keegel wrote:

>My day job is as an IT consultant for Cybersource.  If a client
>(whose computer systems we manage, because they don't have any
>IT staff of their own, lets say) wants me to fill in the paperwork
>to register a domain for them, you're saying I have to tell them
>"sorry, I can't help you to register a domain because auDA policy
>forbids that"?

I agree that my wording needs some refinement. But even as it is,
you could do the "power of attorney" thing Craig suggested once
before. You could probably manage to get a PoA from a customer
you work with regularly, whereas scammers would, I expect, have
trouble getting a PoA by sending out a fake invoice.


>If the answer is that I could be the tech contact for the domain
>and thereby have access to their domain, then what is stopping a
>shonky domain license vendor from being the tech contact for all
>the domains they have registered?

As far as I can tell, being tech contact for a domain in the
.AU namespace is a completely useless. As tech contact I can't
do anything to the domain that a tech needs to do. I can't
recover the domain password, I can't change name servers.

I guess I sometimes get called when there's a fault, but in
the last 10 years I've been tech contact on hundreds of
domains and I've been contacted maybe twice. And I hate to
think how much spam I receive from whois harvesting.

 ...R.