Kim wrote:
>Quoting Jason Pay on Wednesday March 05, 2003:
>| The Registrar fees paid to auDA should be enough to pay for a quarterly 

>| auDA 'Authoritative' mail out similar to the one I mentioned below.
>At the end of the day, for most people domain registration is an
>inconsequential one-off procedure that they should do once and not worry
>about again. In fact, for most it is a procedure done by proxy by their
>ISP or web developer, so they don't know anything about it.
>Such a mailout is treating the symptoms rather than curing the problem.
>(Admittedly, at the moment the industry needs a bit of both..)
>Wearing an "uneducated" domain name holder hat, I don't want to know
>about my domain unless I have to renew it. Just like my business
>name, and various other licences. I probably don't want to know the
>intricacies of our industry. Similarly I don't want to know about how
>my ISP makes routing arrangements, or where my office builder buys his
>cement.
>And now, back to reality. :)
>kim

How many alerts occur per year? Maybe an auDA 'alert' email should be sent 
to registrants as well as posting on the web site? 

The problem is that there is no way to stop organisations from doing a 
misleading mailout, and several different companies have done so in the 
past.

Placing an alert on the auDA web site is only advising people who have an 
interest in the industry, as you state, registrants are not interested in 
the industry news, they are only interested in when their domain name 
expires/needs renewing. I wonder how many registrants have actually 
visited the auDA web site?

In any case, most of the damage will have already occurred by the time the 
alert gets to registrants, and as you state, many may not find out about 
the alert at all.

There is no way to enforce a policy on resellers, it a reseller gets 
banned, they would just close down their companies and start a new one, 
and this would lead to more concerns for the industry.

The only way to solve the situation is to inform the registrants and their 
agents, then if a company does send out a misleading renew guide, the 
registrants will see it for what it is - 'misleading'.

This issue is not going to go away, solutionS must be implemented, if this 
problem continues to occur causing many registrants to get 'burned' they 
will lose faith in the Australian domain name system and go to another 
domain name space.

auDA has a large responsibility with regard to this issue, and auDA has 
the most to lose. This problem need to be made a priority for auDA, and 
not left to the market to sort out. If the market is left to sort it out, 
the majority of registrar's, ethical or not will suffer in the long term. 

Jason Pay