No Such Weblog

In a letter to ICANN, the Public Interest Registry supports a suspension of VeriSign DNS wildcard service, and commits not to implement such a service for .org.

Some rather interesting remarks come close to the end of the letter: We are informed that other domain registries may be exploring services similar to the VeriSign Site Finder. ... If this is the case, our comments concerning Site Finder apply with equal force to those other services. ... Therefore, we urge ICANN to take whatever remedial action is needed to remove all "wildcard" DNS systems, including VeriSign's Site Finder, from the DNS. Such action, emphasizing the central responsibility of all service providers, would be an important step in preserving the openness and accessibility of the Internet.

It will be interesting to see what position the gTLD registry constituency's representatives on the GNSO Council will take tomorrow.

The new .au WHOIS policy (background materials) in a nutshell: The names and e-mail addresses of the registrant and the technical contact are the only personal data disclosed. There are restrictions on the number of queries that a user can send to the WHOIS service. Law enforcement requests are dealt with on a case-by-case basis.