Problems with the Digital Economy Bill - Part 2 (revised)
For those not entirely au fait with what the previous post meant, I’ve rewritten it, below, with in-line annotations.
(5) In this section and sections 124O to 124Q—
(This part deals with the regulation of domain registries, including—but not limited to—Nominet. Quite a few ccTLD’s registries are based in the UK).
“end-user”, in relation to an internet domain registry, means a person who has been or wants to be allocated an internet domain name that is or would be included in the register maintained by the registry;
Okay, so far so good.
“internet domain” means an internet domain indicated by the last element of an internet domain name or by that element together with one or more of the preceding elements of the name;
First hurdle. The definition of “internet domain” is cyclic. It seems safe to assume to infer that this means “domain name” as defined by RFC1034. Note that it refers to the last “element” (DNS calls them “labels”, incidentally) or any number of preceding “elements”. i.e., anything from the last label to the entire domain name.
“internet domain registry” means a relevant body that—
We’ll ignore the lack of clarity regarding “relevant”, for the moment. While we’re at it, let’s pretend that “internet” is well-defined, too.
(a) maintains a register of all of the internet domain names that belong to a particular internet domain, and
I think this can be translated as: “maintains a register of subdomains within a given DNS domain name”.
(b) operates a computer program or server that forms part of the system that enables the names included in the register to be used to access internet portal addresses or other information by means of the internet;
“and operates a DNS server”.
I daren’t imagine where they got the term “internet portal addresses” from.
There are two potential problems with this. Either:
- it’s so poorly-specified that it doesn’t cover any registries at all
- it’s so poorly-specified that it covers anybody who operates a DNS server.
Regarding the second point, it’s not even entirely clear that the DNS server must be public-facing. It’s broad enough that it would, for example, cover a service which gave out subdomains to all and sundry (as LiveJournal, WordPress and Tumblr do, for example)—if they operated within the UK. It even covers reverse-DNS, whose delegations are managed completely separately from “normal” DNS lookups.
It would cover me, because I operate public DNS services for people. It would cover my employer. It would cover virtually every ISP and hosting company, not to mention most large- and medium-sized businesses.
This aspect of the legislation is supposed to be targeted specifically at Nominet.
This is fairly representative of the technical skill employed in drafting this Bill, as far as I can make out.
