[dns-operations] registry/registrar/registrant delegation checks for fun and profit

[Jim Reid]

Mark, your comments on the thread about preventing broken delegations are remarkably naive and totally out of touch with the realities of the domain name business. What you’re saying is the equivalent of saying world poverty can be solved overnight just by giving everyone more money.

Yes, from a purely technical perspective delegation checks could be done. And in some cases, they are done, though usually at registration or renewal time. [In between is another story.] However it is beyond impractical to expect to apply delegation checks universally.

It’s a simple matter of economics. GoDadday (to pick one registrar at random) probably has a gross margin of a couple of dollars on a TLD domain name registration. This would be wiped out if they had to contact someone (anyone) to get a delegation error fixed. Even if they’ve outsourced customer support to minimum wage droids in Elbonia.

Contacting the registrant could be a problem too. The end registrant could be at the end of a long chain of resellers. If so, good luck traversing that chain. Or the registrant could have provided bogus contact data. Yes, that sometimes happens... Or the contact data are out of date. And once actual contact has been established, good luck getting the registrant to take action assuming they even understand the problem.

Now multiply all of that by many thousands or even millions of broken delegations. Then multiply again by some thosands of registrars/resellers/control panels, etc, etc. That’s the extent of the real world problem space facing your straw-man shell script.

The technical check itself is easy. It’s just a ~5 line script. But the goop that goes around those sorts of checks -- procedures, roles, responsibilities, costs, contracts, policies, compliance, customer relations, support agreements, etc -- are hard and expensive. Very hard and very expensive. You’d know this if you had experience of working at a registry or registrar. Or if your day job made you attend CANN meetings.

If you think broken delegations must be prevented and that registries or registrars or resellers or registrants *must* Do Something about this, free to submit your proposals to ICANN*. Its policy making machinery is open to all. *Other TLD policy-making fora are available.

BTW the domain name portfolio for many large companies is usually managed by its marketing department, often in co-operation with a specialist registrar. That big company’s clueful DNS administrators may well have no influence at all over how the delegation of example.TLD is handled at the registry or how the company’s DNS provider(s) handles the NS RRsets for the domain(s).