> > There is nothing unethical about any of this, it's a perfectly
> > reasonable support arrangement.
>
> And this is where we disagree. The admin contact should be the domain
> registrant. The potential for abuse is too high otherwise, and the
> only way to straighten out anything abusive done would require what
> could be prohibitively expensive legal action.
May I inject some actual experience here?
I've been involved in dozens of cases of users who were not the admin
contact for their domain wanting to transfer the domain hosting here
and having problems of varying degrees, so I am sensitive to the issue
William is raising. However, in all cases except a handful the issue
has been resolved within a few days without recourse to legal action.
NSI has, as an operating principle, that the registrant has final say,
regardless of what the admin contact says or does. They provide a fax
"back door" for the registrant to exert his/her authority when
necessary. If the ISP providing guidance knows the procedure,
including NSI's 5-point checklist for validating faxes, and if the
registrant follows instructions in detail, action is swift - 3-4
business days most of the time.
The only cases I've seen that involved legal action also involved a
more serious ethical abuse - that of service providers registering
themselves as *registrant* - i.e., as owner of client domains.
There is an intermediate solution that I think can meet the issues
William is raising and still let service providers handle domain
issues for clients. Under the NSI model, a domain contact can be a
person or a "role". One example of a "role" contact is having the
billing contact be "accounts payable" at/for the registrant. This
lets the registrant company designate and change where the bills go
without involving changes in the domain registration.
If the registered admin contact were a "domain administration" role at
the registrant, the company could change who actually handled this for
them without changing their domain registration. The paper mail
address for domain administration should be at the registrant company,
but since very little domain activity involves paper mail anyway, the
company can outsource the role to an agent by having the role's email
go to the agent.
This doesn't solve all possible ethical/hostage issues, but there's
nothing that does, including having the registrant and admin contact
be the same. However, this does solve a much more common problem than
ethical transgressions - namely, cases where an employee who is
designated admin contact for a company's domain leaves the company.
All too often this happens with nobody remembering to change the
domain registration, and these cases are often further compounded by
email addresses becoming invalid.
--
Dick St.Peters, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Gatekeeper, NetHeaven, Saratoga Springs, NY
Saratoga/Albany/Amsterdam/BoltonLanding/Cobleskill/Greenwich/
GlensFalls/LakePlacid/NorthCreek/Plattsburgh/...
Oldest Internet service based in the Adirondack-Albany region
