Proposed ICANN Changes to Make Domain Hijacking Easier

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Adam Fields <ip20398470293845 () aquick org>
Date: November 11, 2004 10:59:30 AM EST
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: Ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Proposed ICANN Changes to Make Domain Hijacking Easier

For IP, if you wish

On Thu, Nov 11, 2004 at 10:48:15AM -0500, David Farber wrote:
> > What possible rationality is there is justify this policy?
>
> In the past, if you wanted to transfer your domain(s) away from a
> certain well-known registrar, the message from that registrar was often
> lost on its way to you. Since you did not reply to the message
> allegedly sent to you, your domain(s) could not be transferred to your
> preferred registrar, and you had to keep suffering the old registrar's
> poor customer service.

Admittedly, it's a problem if you can't transfer your domains away
from a problem registrar. However, solving this problem by allowing
all requested transfers to go through by default is NOT the right
solution, and it will likely make more problems than it fixes. We know
the spammers harvest whois. What's to prevent them from sending out
valid-sounding transfer requests for every domain and picking up the
ones where the owner isn't paying attention or doesn't understand the
changes?

Is it realistic to believe that this problem could not be solved in a
way that addressed problem registrars instead of opening up legitimate
domain holders to vulnerability? How about doing transfer request
authorization by some method that's a bit more reliable than email?

Legal notices are often delivered by certified mail or some other
verifiable method - how did we get stuck on assuming that email alone
was okay and building the solution around that?

--
                                - Adam

-----
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