> From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <hallam@xxxxxxxxx> > What is worrying here is not just the lack of oversight in these particular > cases. If these practices become a regular occurrence they are going to be > interpreted as an attack and countermeasures will begin to emerge. What appears is that certain organizations have been asserting rights that they don't have. Which is really a rather common practice in the real world. The central problem, IMO, is that the registrar, Public Domain Registry, fell for these assertions. In a sense, the registrar had sufficient oversight applied to it, as EasyDNS took them to arbitration and won. But it shouldn't take that much effort to get a registrar to follow the rules. It seems that the oversight that is needed is to ensure that registrars are sufficiently punished for not following the rules that they do follow the rules. The analogy is with other organizations that hold valuable property belonging to others. For instance, a bank holds money that belongs to other people. People would not be particularly surprised if a random person walked into a bank and attempted to obtain the money that belonged to another person. But they would be aghast if the bank did give it to them. Dale