The U.S. Department of Commerce has proposed new customer verification requirements for Infrastructure as a Service providers. The goal of the ‘Know Your Customer’ regime is to prevent fraud and abuse, including piracy. In response to this plan, prominent rightsholders want the department to expand the proposal’s scope to include domain name registrars and registries. Ideally, they argue, domain companies should also be required to take down pirate domains.
I just want the convenience store clerk to finally get arrested because he failed to review the customer’s medical records before selling him the red bull that put him into cardiac arrest. It’s time to have more thorough disclosure between merchant and customer everywhere. Time has shown over and over that anonminmity is only beneficial for criminals to abuse well intentioned systems.