Is the .to (Tonga) domain completely rogue and should be removed?

Nathan J. Mehl memory at blank.org
Thu Oct 1 15:09:29 UTC 1998


In the immortal words of Barry Shein (bzs at world.std.com):
> 
> The specific question was whether or not the .to domain serves any
> useful purpose (such as a TLD for the Kingdom of Tonga) -- is there
> any reason to maintain it in the root servers?

Is the Kingdom of Tonga a recognized nation-state?  Does it have an ISO
country code assigned to it?  Is the general policy of the root servers
to host NS records for any ISO country-code domain legitmately operated
by an entity within that country?  

QED...

Barry, this seems sort of silly.  They have a stated abuse policy.  You
have evidence that one of their registrants is operating in contravention
to that policy.  What on earth is preventing you from making the obvious
phone call?

For what it's worth, I suspect that we will see a similar effect any 
time a new domain with a liberal registration policy comes online.
People will flock to it, and among those people will be some bad actors.
For a while, it'll be particularly visible, until the spammers and suchlike
figure out that a different domain name doesn't shield them from anything,
then it'll fade into the background -- just another TLD.  Rinse and
repeat.

-n

------------------------------------------------------------<memory at blank.org>
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