[dns-operations] Delegation checking (was: Re: Some DNSSEC trivia)

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 11:05:49AM -0800, Jo Rhett wrote:

> >registries attempt to enforce this rule without the ability to notify
> >registrants that their names are going dark.
> 
> People keep saying this, but the registration agreement as far back  
> at 1993 (earliest I have) says that it's the registrant's  
> responsibility to keep their contact information up to date.

That doesn't matter.  Registries aren't allowed to contact the
registrants directly.  They have to go through the registrars.  This
isn't that surprising: retailers don't like retail customers to be
talking to wholesalers generally.  So if the registry performs an
action on a domain, and it causes the domain to go dark, there is the
potential of the registrant quite correctly complaining that s/he
wasn't informed of the action by the registry.

This is the reason, I expect (but IANAL, &c.) that ICANN's pages and
just about every registry's tech support will tell registrants to talk to their
registrar about problems _first_: the registrar is supposed to be the
only point of contact between the DNS and the registrant.

I understand why people of a technical bent think the above state of
affiars is inefficient and prone to needless points of failure.  But
if you look at it as a piece of social engineering designed to work
around an old state of affairs (a single registry company with control
over several important TLDs, and anxiety on the part of the community
about same), it makes a certain amount of sense.  

A

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