Tony,

Protection comes from two pieces of generally well thought of policy.

Firstly, that any domain registered in .com.au is owned by an identifiable
legal entity. This is important because it enables interested parties to
uniquely identify the licensee of a name - thereby stripping the anonymity
enjoyed and abused by registrants in .com for example.

The second part is policy that stipulates that a registrant must have some
connection to the name registered. Now this is clearly broad enough to allow
anyone to register anything, BUT it gives the regulator teeth in addressing
complaints by enabling their executive to make executive decisions when
common sense indicates a name has been registered in bad faith or for
clearly cyber squatting reasons. That enables auDA to de-register names
without the complainant resorting to expensive DRP.

That second part of policy is necessarily subjective and provides .au with a
first line of defence.

Beyond that, it is properly the jurisdiction of a DRP process and possibly
the courts, because you get into the realm of competing claims for rights
over a name that can be far from trivial to judge. auDA should not be in the
position of determining which of two parties has the more complete claim to
a name when it is not obvious to all.

The sort of registration you want registrars to make a call on are likely to
be so obvious that if a complaint is made, auDA will simply make the obvious
call. There is no need to hold up ALL registrations when there is another
line of defence.

.com.au is protected. If you are not a eligible business you cannot get a
name. If you provide false warrants as to your connection to a name you
stand to lose it. If you blatantly cyber squat, you will find your name
de-registered upon complaint. If you want to identify a registrant, there is
sufficient public whois information to do so.

Larry

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tony Owen [mailto:tony§seol.net.au] 
> Sent: Monday, 4 April 2005 10:02
> To: dns§dotau.org
> Subject: Re: [DNS] Why have a policy?
> 
> 
> > For the 50-odd possibly dodgy registrations a month out of 
> 14,000, is 
> > it worth sacrificing the beneficial goal of automated registrations?
> 
> I dont disagree with your stand. I would have no personal 
> problems with the 
> domain space being opened up entirely and instant 
> registration would be 
> nice. But if we are paying a little extra for "protected" 
> name space ... 
> shouldn't it be
> "protected"?
> 
> Cheers Tony
> 
> 
> 
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