As regular readers probably know, I run Blacknight. Blacknight is Ireland’s largest hosting provider and domain name registrar. We’re also the only Irish company to ever have been accredited with ICANN. And we’re the single largest registrar of .ie domain names on the planet.

If you peruse the archives here and on my personal blog you’ll see quite a few articles which are quite critical (justifiably in my view) of the IEDR.

One of the things that has always bothered me is how IEDR actually came into being.

As an organisation they’re not exactly the most transparent. Sure, they publish annual reports, but they’re a private company. They’re not owned by their stakeholders nor do they have any clear remit to serve public interest (they might claim otherwise, but it’s not in their company documents)

I was curious, so I did a bit of research into who knew what about things and who to ask.

The .ie zone is still delegated in IANA to UCD so they were my obvious starting point. I won’t bore readers with the details of the FOI request battle I had with UCD, but suffice to say that they weren’t exactly quick to respond taking the thick end of a year to do so. However in the end I got a bunch of documents. They were sent to me as hardcopy, so they’ve been scanned to PDF and zipped up into one big file.

Here’s a photo of the pile of documents with their covering letter ..

And here’s a download of the zip file – it’s pretty big (sorry!) (Here’s a smaller version)

And to see what the current status of IE Domain Registry Limited is here’s their memos and arts:

IEDR-memos-and-arts

So the next question .. is Comreg subject to FOI rules or not?

UPDATE: Smaller version of the files provided

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