Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
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Message from AFNIC (.fr) to ICANN
2 October 2003
From: Jean-Yves Babonneau
Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2003 12:33 AM
To: Anne Rachel Inné
Cc: Olivier Guillard; Loic Damilaville
Subject: Re: AFNIC et Wildcard
AFNIC, registry of ".fr", deeply regrets the recent introduction of wildcards records in the ".com" and ".net" zones. AFNIC promised not to use such wildcards in ".fr" (see the official statement at <http://www.nic.fr/nouvelles/2003/wildcards.html>, in French only).
Such wildcards are an important factor of confusion for users (whose software is no longer able to tell the difference between a real name and a synthetized one) and raise very serious privacy issues (the ability to store at least a part of the email and Web activity).
A change so substantial in the management of a public resource should never be introduced without a long and deep public discussion with all the stakeholders, something which did not occur in that case.