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Comment by mvdwoord | Hacker News Reader

Agree, this is deceptive, and highly annoying as consumer too. There must be some consumer protection laws in the EU that can be used against this?

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Sadly not, the corrupt ICANN seems out of reach of European regulators.

These are ccTLDs, though, ICANN is out of the picture there, they have no authority after delegation. It's the fault of DENIC, the German ccTLD local operator. DENIC is a German entity, they are very much within reach of regulators.

(That's also the reason why foreign ccTLDs of, eh, semi-stable countries, e.g. .so domains, are risky - should the local operator start to lose it at some point, no-one can help you, neither ICANN nor IANA)

The domain registry isn't even relevant here - the authorities can go directly after Liferando - who are doing business in Germany - no matter what TLD or other medium they use for their fraud.

They could fracture the internet. I expect even the threat would bring ICANN into line.

Judging from their handling of the American-dominated search, email and cloud shenanigans to the EU's detriment already, the EU probably can't even conceive that the infrastructure giants like PCH even need to be threatened yet. They are very slow on the uptake.

Yeah and it feels Germany more than other EU states is dragging behind in everything IT related.

Perhaps the problem isn't as much the lack of political will, but rather lack of competence.

The lack of competence is downstream of a lack of vision. Fix it and the competence will come. Don't fix it and every attempt to imbue competence will fail.

> corrupt ICANN

Could you elaborate?

A recent example is what they first did, and then tried to do, to .org in 2019.

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