[sf-lug] sf-lug.{org, com, info} & Registrant Email: no.valid.email at worldnic.com & Network Solutions / Web.com

[Rick Moen]

I wrote:

> Here's a letter from ICANN in 2002 to NetSol, complaining that they had
> numerous domains' contacts set to the non-deliverable worldnic.net address
> over a year after ICANN specifically threatened to terminate their
> ability to be a registrar over the practice.
> 
> https://www.icann.org/resources/unthemed-pages/touton-letter-to-beckwith-2002-09-03-en
> 
> Which reminds me of a subsidiary point:  ICANN sends mail to domain
> owners and other domain contacts periodically to test whether the mail
> is deliverable, and reminding domain administrators of the requirement
> that contacts have valid e-mail addresses.  They occasionally threaten
> to unilaterally ordered cancelled domain registrations whose contacts
> cannot be reached.

A few points of interest.  


1. People who follow the link might have noticed the letter was
addressed to 'Network Solutions, Inc. Registrar' but also refers to the
company as 'VeriSign Registar'.  This was in 2002, when NetSol, the
registrar (retail) half of the old InterNIC, was still owned by
VeriSign, which much later sold NetSol off to private investors. 


2.  Letter cites violation of the 'Registrar Accreditation Agreement
(RAA)' entered into between ICANN and VeriSign Registrar.  Which might,
or should, raise in your mind the question 'Who is ICANN, and where does
it get off requiring everyone, including sovereign countries' national 
domains and hundreds of domain registrars, to answer to it?'

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a California
non-profit corporation.  And its powers are largely sheer bluff.
Nobody elected them; they're largely self-appointed.

The pre-existing body that coordinated the Internet on an ad-hocracy
basis was IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.  IANA was
basically Jon Postel, Joyce K. Reynolds[1], and Vint Cerf at UCLA
coordinating formalising of Internet protocols in their spare time as
academics.  As this work was recognised by various academics and
government bureaucrats as more important than anything _they_ were
doing, IANA got a 'contract' (basically a grant) from DoD to do this
work.  Renewals of the 'contract' were funneled via DARPA and USC'S
Information Sciences Institute.

USC wanted to hand off this subsidy to someone, and word got to the US
Department of Commerce.  They didn't want to manage IANA directly, so
they invited someone to create a non-profit corporation to somehow be
the umbrella.  Thus ICANN got created in 1998 to do that task, and
impliedly get grants from various governments to cover operations.  Jon
Postel was intended to be CEO, but he then suddenly died.  ICANN got
started without him under a Dept. of Commerce contract, and IANA became
in a formal sense a subsidiaty of ICANN.

Back to 'Who give ICANN the right to run the world's Internet?', the
dumb answer is 'US Dept. of Commerce does', which is dumb because
obviously US Dept. of Commerce cannot speak for the planet, and doesn't
even properly speak for the Internet here in the USA.

At some point, ICANN got an 'agreement' with IETF, the Internet
Engineering Task Force, a counterpart standards body complementary to
IANA that coordinates publishing of RFCs.  But that leaves the main
question unaddressed.USC'S Information Sciences Institute.

And it never will be, because in fact ICANN has no worldwide mandate. 
Also, in 2009, US Dept. of Commerce cut loose ICANN, declaring it
independent, so it's not even speaking with implied US Federal authority 
any more.  (Presumably, it still gets some Dept. of Commerce funding.)

How does ICANN push around registrars?  Sheer bluff and unmitigated
gall, near as I can tell.  ICANN keeps making announcements about it
having authority over IANA-coordinated (but variously funded) root
nameservers all over the world.  They presumably pay salaries of a few
IANA principals, but I figure the claim that they have authority over
the world's DNS infrastructure would last about five minutes past the
time they attempt to do anything any major national or transnational
stakeholder dislikes.

Which brings me to:


3.  The periodic e-mails ICANN mails to domain contacts threatening to
order registrations revoked for domains with unreachable contacts:  
ICANN has willingly stepped forward to bluster at people as the tool 
of trademark commercial interests.  Trademark interests have long been
worried about enforcing trademark rights on the Internet, and insist 
on the ability to look up and contact domain stakeholders in order to
be able to threaten them with litigation over claimed trademark
infringement.  ICANN is glad to do this, because doing so bolsters its 
claim of being in a position of responsibility.



[1] Ms. Reynolds just died, and the world has _not_ properly appreciated 
her contributions, not by half.  Vint Cerf noted her death here:  
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/e9UDzTAAWSlXA2g9bhMbv1SHTx4

Somm comments at Hacker News:  http://hackernewsmobile.com/story/10816960
ICANN hasn't even bothered to update its pages, but at least it has 
more about her than the abysmal Wikipedia page: 
http://icannwiki.com/Joyce_Reynolds