RE: [registrars] POTENTIAL LEGAL PITFALL

["Ross Wm. Rader" <ross@tucows.com>]

> one Friday and which I posted to the list yesterday. On Slide 
> #25 you will see the Fair Credit Reporting Act, 15 USC 1681 
> et seq. Under this act you may be committing a violation of 
> the law if you compile fraudulent credit card information and 
> use it inappropriately. THIS IS SERIOUS STUFF.

15 USC 1681 deals with standards for credit reporting by consumer
reporting agencies and likely other things. I think the point here is
that individual registrars need to consult competent legal counsel
before the engaging in new business methods or partnerships. 

Fair. 

With that being said, the FTC is but one agency and it doesn't do Bhavin
or BobC or Me much good that US law enforcement is going to catch some
bad guys for their constituents. Putting the FTC at the forefront of any
constituency effort likely not only violates our constituency charter,
but doesn't get us all that far down the road towards solving the core
problem, which, as I see it, is this;

Registrars are getting financially hammered by fraud. We need to
ameliorate this with better law, better practice and better policy.

Better practice. The email that you quoted is a great example best
practices that registrars can implement to cut their losses. We need to
do more in the way of education - perhaps someone from First Data,
Paymentech and Cybersource would volunteer to do a panel discussion at
our next meeting and share some tips to minimize fraud and chargebacks.
In my experience they are more than willing to work with merchants,
especially large groups of merchants.

Better law. We have relatively easy access to the GAC. We should use it
more effectively. Outside of GNSO channels, we should be wary of mission
creep unless we wilfully determine that our charter is too narrow and
amend it.

Better policy. Bhavin and others have put forward some great ideas. We
need to refine and adopt these proposals as positions that will allow us
to work with the registries. As I mentioned, it doesn't much help that
we are usually talking to ourselve, so anything that we can do to bring
the registries to the table with a position in hand is helpful.

If we can narrow scope to what we can effectively deal with rather than
the short-term political agenda of any particular faction, we should be
able to come up with a series of solutions that prefers our interests.


                       -rwr




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