CircleID

Ram, the success of .IN is going to be seen to grow going forward, and it is something that I believe that Afilias has done a fantastic job in providing the registry services for.

Ram, congz with the successful .IN implementation.

Ram, congratulations on doing a great job. I must say it is a relief to register .in domains without going through a huge rigmarole of form filling and assorted other bureaucracy.

There is of course the problem of firms getting accredited as .in registrars, who can be charitably described as fly by night, at best, or actively malicious at worst.

http://www.inregistry.in/accredited_registrars/ lists, among others,

Ikon Marketing (http://www.ikonmktg.com/) - known spam operation.  http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?q=ikonmktg.com .. I remember them being listed in spamhaus.org as well

Given the huge problem that is currently being faced with spammers abusing the domain registration process to signup dozens of throwaway domains with fake registration info, I feel that some kind of due diligence could be done to avoid fly by night registrars coming into the picture.

I know that this may be tough to do, but not doing this seems a risky move that will sooner or later lead to pollution of the .in namespace with randomly named spammer domains, something that has been noted previously in other TLDs like .biz and .info

Yes, this is carping criticism, but I get to see massive abuse of a process that was designed to be as simple and convenient as possible, on a daily basis - at the receiving end of all the spam that can be thrown at a our servers.

regards
--srs

ps - Given that we are a large ISP with over 40 million users on large freemail / university domains, here's a sample of a minute's worth of our logs, as sampled some months back by one of my colleagues
http://tin.nixcartel.org/~devdas/minute.png

Suresh,
Thanks for your kind words.

Your comments are very welcome - I take your comments in a constructive light, and not as carping.

I will forward your comments to the Registrar Evaluation Committee - and also ask that you send these same comments to the <support at registry dot in> and <registry at nixi dot org dot in> addresses.

Regards,
Ram

thanks, i will do this

-suresh

James, Jothan - thanks for your words of praise - it was good to be part of a successful implementation team, and even better to see good pickup in the marketplace.

I hope that more ccTLDs liberalize, open and grow - just doing that often aids in the publicity and education of the public about what the Internet and the domain name system can do for them.

-ram

Ram,

I too am glad to see that .IN relaunch is gaining success. 

I would caution that given the registrars "Liberal" policies, http://www.inregistry.in/policies/ that some significant inprovments in these policies are needed to address spam and the policing of same.

As many of our members have discovered, and I as well have recognized, and inordanant amount of spam is originatiang from .co.in domain names.  I hope that a strong anti-spam policy from http://www.inregistry.in/ will be forthcoming in the very near future..

Currently our advisory to our members and a number of ISP's is to block .co.in entierly unless or until adaquate anti-spam policies with vigorous enforcment provisions are included in registration policy for .IN, and implimentation of same is in place with a reporting mechnisim for all stakeholders/users of the internet, avaliable for review and further comment and suggestion of inprovments..

funny. i run a rather large isp's antispam operations (40 million users is large enough I hope) but so far I haven't seen

1. That .co.in is any better or worse than any other .in second level TLD

2. Not nearly as much spam from india as from (say) Taiwan, China, Korea etc

3. That there is any reason at all for me to block, or advise any ISP to block, an entire ccTLD or sTLD.  Not even .biz or .info, which seem to comprise the bulk of the pharmacy spam domains - we block something on the order of three hundred brand new / throwaway domains abused by spammers, every day, an unhealthy percentage of which are biz and info.

I would definitely be interested in just what rationale (or rhyme, or reason, or whatever you call it) you follow when you issue your advice.

Suresh Ramasubramanian and all,

I agree that .co.in Domains generate less spam than does Taiwan, China, or Korea… And less than .info as well..

However that was not my main point if you read my response closely and in its entirity. 

My main point was regarding the fact that no policies are in place for registration under .IN's new more liberlized registration rules/policies that even mentions addressing Domains registered in the .IN name space… And as such sending a signal or message inadvertantly that spammers are welcome…

I perfectly agree about sending signals - but there's a rather good, existing mechanism for that, which doesnt involve broadcast advisories asking people to block sTLDs

This is an interesting area to explore ... should a domain name registry have the responsibility and the authority to also set domain name usage policies?  This question is often more complicated for a gTLD than a ccTLD.

(I think) the argument above is that registries should regulate domain name usage.  In many circles, the opposite argument stands that the real task of a domain registry is to run a stable, reliable, secure and predictable technology service, and that issues such as spam are already legislated in various national jurisdictions.

-ram

Ram, here's the way you can go about it.

1. Have policies for fair and accurate reporting of information set by the registry .. *.in used to require faxes of company registrations etc, no need to go to that extent but make sure that you have something about domains not being able to be registered as M.Mouse or D.Duck

2. Select registrars who can be proactive, and work with them to ensure that abusive domain registrations are cut off, fast.

3. Work with the registrars to watch for abusive signup patterns for domain names and see if you cant suppress these. Quite often these signups are from stolen credit cards, so it is in their interest, I'd say.

Ram and all,

Registries and registrars should step up to the plate, so to speak and set policies for Domain name uses with respect to spam, phising scams, and hacking uses of the Domain Name registered.

Legislation is also fine, but in many countries spam legislation is weak and often not adaquately enforcable.  Hence working with law inforcment as a willing partner in helping to fight spam is the right thing for registries and ICANN to do. 

These are very helpful comments, thank you.  I remain wary of registries and/or registrars taking on the role of domain name use police ... at least in the gTLD world, it's a low-margin world and not easily economically supportable.

We're touching on a larger-scale issue affecting more than just .in ... Suresh, I wonder about your experience with larger ccTLDs like .de or .uk - do they have more stringent usage policies/monitoring?  What about smaller but also popular ccTLDs like .us or .cn?

ram: the policies as such seem to be driven by different registrars.

godaddy has been quite proactive about stamping down on spammer registered domains, especially where they have evidence of bogus contact info.

directi in india took some extensive prodding to do it - but they have been doing a decent job as well.

you can talk to richard cox or steve linford fro m spamhaus, they'll be delighted to work with you on this matter.

just adding to my comment - it would be quite useful for the registry to be proactive in that it

1. works with registrars to set up antispam acceptable use policies

2. watches for signs of fraudulent registration, and alerts registrars to these trends. the registry has a macro level view of the situation - aggregating these trends across all its registrars, and can be of a lot of help

Thanks for the warning about the unreliable registrars. It was timely, since I was looking to register a .in domain.

Can I ask someone here to recommend a few food ones? Please?

Thanks
MM

eNom, Directi etc all offer .in domains now. If you see a registrar you recognize, rather than a hole in the wall outfit, then feel free to use it.

These are not recommendations, but registrars whom I have used personally and have had good experiences with:

International Registrars: gld.in, enom, directi
Local Registrars: net4india, sify

-Ram