Re[2]: [ga] OECD vs ICANN, re: WHOIS accuracy

[Karl Auerbach <karl@cavebear.com>]

On Sun, 7 Jul 2002, Allan Liska wrote:

> I would like to suggest an alternative to the legal contact though.
> If the goal is to reach someone responsible for the domain

May I suggest that you are making an assumption that DNS names are
unambiguous.

If you get foo.biz - how do you know where to look?

Remember, there are at least *two* .biz top level domains and you don't
know which one is being used.  (By-the-way, I use the non-ICANN version of
.biz)

You are trying to saddle authenticity onto a system that is not
unambiguous and is subject to easy forgery.

And the horse you are trying to saddle ran out of the barn a long time
ago: DNS is not a mandatory system - one need not use it at all.  There
are other naming systems (NIS, WINS, etc).  And there are multiple DNS
systems.  And naked IP addresses often work very nicely -
http://199.184.128.35/tmp/12345.htm

(The only reason that you can do a reverse lookup on the IP address above
is that I maintain my reverse lookup zone.  I could chose not to do so or
I could be lax in maintaining it.)

If you really want to know where that address belongs, your best bet is to 
do a whois query against IP delegation data maintained by the RIRs.

		--karl--



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