THE LEAST SUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT TO CANCEL A DOMAIN NAME
We often experience situations that we can hardly believe. What follows is one such true case. The staff of ZID, the central information service of the Johannes Kepler University of Linz (JKU), has provided the following story as a candidate for the collection of heroic failures:
One of the jobs of ZID is the administration of domains held by JKU, the application for new domains, as well as the cancellation of no longer required domain names. This must be done by NIC.AT, the Austrian domain administrator, according to international Internet regulations.
Now, in a specific case, ZID has been advised by the rector of JKU to cancel a domain with a rather obscure name, after he has been informed about the following:
An unknown person, who apparently found the association between this domain name in question and JKU to be a good joke, has managed to indirectly register this domain to JKU. It is currently unknown how he or she succeeded to make JKU the official holder of this domain. Naturally the rector of JKU and the ZID staff have a different view about this matter and a different sense of humor in such cases.
ZID accordingly contacted and advised NIC.AT to perform the canceling procedure for the mentioned domain.
It turns out that this demand developed into a heroic failure story because:
The official reply from NIC.AT, in strict adherence to their administration rules was, that cancellation would only be possible with the personal signature of Mr. Johannes Kepler. Any efforts to explain that Mr. Kepler would not be able to sign the cancellation form because he died several hundred years ago - he lived 1571- 1630 – have been without success so far, because NIC.AT insists that in such cases, where the owner has died, a death certificate has to be supplied.
By the way, the cancellation of the domain is finished now: We wonder how ZID managed to get a copy of the death certificate of Johannes Kepler.
