Irish Freedom of Information Act applied to .ie registry

Antóin Ó'Lachtnáin, who keeps a web log (known as a blog) at eire.com, has long complained that the .ie registry is run in "a very untransparent fashion." To break the veil of secrecy, he put in a request under Ireland's Freedom of Information Act in October 2002 to see files relating to it.

The Act enables members of the public to obtain access, "to the greatest extent possible consistent with the public interest and the right to privacy," to information in the possession of public bodies".

The .ie registry has been run by IE Domain Registry (IEDR) Ltd., a company limited by guarantee, since July 2000. Prior to that, UCD acted as the registry. Only IEDR can administer .ie - which it does as a public service. However, UCD is still listed as IEDR's sponsoring organisation and Ó'Lachtnáin wants to see their correspondence.

Among Ó'Lachtnáin's concerns, he argues that when a fee was first charged to cover the cost of providing domain registration services, it was promised that the Registry would follow best European practice and would regularly publish accounts of income and expenditure. But since IEDR took over the running of the Registry, Ó'Lachtnáin says it has refused to provide anything but the most basic historical financial information.

The wholesale price levied for .ie domains is the most expensive in Europe, at €69.95 per year – and that's if an application is accepted. Ó'Lachtnáin points out that IEDR is inconsistent in the rules it applies to determining what domain names can and cannot be registered with a .ie suffix.

The accounts which IEDR published this year did not give a breakdown of how much money was spent on the actual operation of the Registry and how much was spent on ancillary activities, such as sponsorship, membership of the consortium seeking to operate the .eu domain and publications.

Despite objections from UCD and IEDR, he has now received written confirmation from Ireland's Information Commissioner that he is entitled to see the files and has posted a copy of the letter on his site.

All available documents that refer neither to privileged information nor to details about a third party are to be released to Ó'Lachtnáin.

The college has 8 weeks to comply with the information request.

The full text of the decision is available on Ó'Lachtnáin's site at:
www.eire.com/blogarchives/000029.html