Registrar Protection Act (5): And how about a little bit of education?

All of the stories in this series of blogs, can be explained in one sentence: when your washing machine get broken, you are naturally calling postman to fix it. Internet is important; money, media, TV, almost everything flows through it, but the ones who needs to regulate it, they are calling “postman to fix washing machine”. And washing machine stays broken…

The key word in all these blog stories is content, and who takes responsibility for it. Registry and registrar of the domain name are easiest to find and to blame, but they are not responsible for the content of the website. Courts, inspectors, and governments are lost in jurisdictions on Internet, they put awkward legislation and awkward style of solving this issue. Hosting is a problem for all of them to understand and differentiate from domains. Why?

Answer is simple: lack of knowledge and education in all governmental structures, courts, agencies, police… If there are major internet technologies (domain names, DNS, BGP, IP addresses…) just in traces on faculties across the world, we all have a big problem: we end up with lousy legislation, lousy understanding of domain issues, and implicitly lousy court decisions and police reactions. That’s why cops, inspectors and police, don’t know what the hell is hosting, and how to spend 5 minutes to extract hosting company from DNS on domain name. Still, all of them knows how to read, and they read WhoIs for domains, but not for IP addresses…

Therefor, I will end by highlighting the obvious facts:

1. Registry and registrar are not responsible for the content on a website!
2. Registrant is not the same as owner of a website and he may not be responsible for content on a website, either!
3. Owner of a website is responsible for the content on a website! Hosting company must have his data and is also responsible for a content on website to the certain degree!
4. Learn how to read DNS and how to find hosting company! Registrar is not a hosting company!
5. If you have the power (like courts, governments, police…) it doesn’t mean that you have knowledge – ask experts!

Any lawyer volunteering to write Registrar Protection Act?