[RFCI-Discuss] zone contact

[Derek J. Balling]

> Many WHOIS services these days provide output that does not include
> "zone contact" as specified in the "VERIFICATION OF DATA" Section of
> RFC1032.  We think that by the letter of that RFC, any submission for
> whois.rfc-ignorant.org listing of any domain whose WHOIS output  
> does not
> include "zone contact" (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) should be
> accepted.  We feel that it is important to have information about who
> has primary responsibility for a domain's zone (the zone contact, as
> opposed to the technical contact, who has primary responsibility for
> serving the zone contact's data via the domain's zone file or  
> equivalent
> to the Internet using a name daemon or equivalent) outside of the zone
> itself (that is, separate from the domain's SOA Record) in order to
> provide out-of-band communication when the RNAME (bastardized email
> address of the responsible person) from the domain's SOA Record (and
> therefore its zone) is unavailable.

The problem is that "zone contact" ... in RFC1032, is not adequately  
defined as to its scope. In other words, 1032 says "zone contact"  
even though (now that 954 is gone) there's nothing which defines  
"what a zone contact is, and what that data contains".

So, given this orphaned language, you have to interpret it in the  
fashion which is most beneficial to the domain-holder (just as how,  
when a law is ambiguous, it is supposed to be interpreted in a  
fashion most beneficial to the defendant). To this end, any "contact  
info" really meets the ambiguous definition of a "zone contact". It  
might be the "zone's technical contact" or the "zone's abuse  
contact", or even the "zone's billing contact" in reality, but given  
what we have to work with, verbiage-wise, there's not a lot of room  
to complain.

Cheers,
D


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 2419 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.megacity.org/pipermail/rfci-discuss/attachments/20060827/56609ecd/smime.bin