On 17 Apr 2004 at 1:40, Ian Smith wrote:

> > Domain Name  	Expiry Date
>  > namescout.com.au  	August 3, 2004
>  > 
>  > § http://www.namescout.com/renewal/index.asp
>  > 
>  > 72 hours and counting.
> 
> Looks like it's fixed tonight; expiry is blanked out, from here anyway.
> 

Well they fixed it quicker than the time they take to send a registrant a key/UDAI.
(more on this later)

In the meantime... just so that that even CD can cope with the implications of this 
breach, in the auDA Whois Policy (http://www.auda.org.au/policies/auda-2003-08/)
it says

 "4.4 In the past, it was possible to use WHOIS to find out the creation and/or expiry 
date of a domain name. This enabled some members of the domain name industry to 
send unsolicited renewal notices to registrants with whom they did not have a prior 
business relationship, causing significant levels of customer confusion. As a result of 
these problems, auDA has determined that creation, renewal and expiry dates will not 
be disclosed on the WHOIS service. Registrants who wish to check the creation, 
renewal or expiry date of their own domain name can do so through their registrar or 
reseller."

Questions for auDA to answer include:

a) why didn't auDA  ensure Registrars were in compliance.
b) has auDA at anytime required Namescout to state that they were in compliance 
c) what sanctions will auDA place on Namescout for this breach eg. stop them taking 
new registrations for a period
d) which entity has auDA authorised to to be the "Namescut" registrar? Is it 
Momentous Australia Pty Ltd (ACN 095 441 571), the owners of namescout.com.au 
and momentous.com.au, as implied by the link from the auDA accredited registrars 
listing or some other entity? Note that at namescout.com (which is what 
namescout.com.au is aliased to) the entity is described as  Namescout Corp. of 
Whitepark House, White Park Road, Bridgetown
Barbados (even though they operate in Nepean, Ontario, Canada). 
e) does auDA support Namescout of Barbados/Canada being able to avoid paying 
GST on .au domain transactions thereby denying this country of tax revenues and 
giving that registrar an unfair advantage over Australian based registrars?


cb