Re: [weirds] fyi: WHOIS Policy Review Team Final Report

["Smith, Bill" <[e-mail]>]

Thanks all for your comments on the WHOIS report. I've taken the liberty
of forwarding a link to the WEIRDS ARCHIVE TO THE WHOIS Review Team. While
our work is officially (from an ICANN perspective) completed, most if not
all of us maintain an interest in and commitment to improving WHOIS
(protocol, data, and service).

While I can't speak for the team, your thoughtful comments are
appreciated. I will note that the Report is now in the hands of the ICANN
Board and additional comments may be submitted at
http://www.icann.org/en/news/public-comment/whois-rt-final-report-11may12-e
n.htm.

On 5/17/12 6:40 AM, "Andrew Sullivan" <[e-mail]> wrote:

>On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 01:33:57AM -0000, John Levine wrote:
>> This is a surprisingly good report.
>
>It's interesting you say that.  I had exactly the opposite reaction.
>There are problems both large and small.  The executive summary has a
>bad definition of what a domain name is.  The report makes a number of
>preposterous recommendations, like that ICANN should, for some reason,
>start chasing all referrals in whois (because, apparently, people
>don't know how to use whois and this will magically enable them to do
>so), and attempts to extent ICANN's regulatory reach into areas where
>it has no business (and where it will fail anyway).  It gets its
>history wrong, and just ignores IRIS.  It makes the distinction among
>the service, protocol, and data but does not attend to that
>distinction throughout.  It points out, but offers no suggestions for
>resolving, the basic inconsistency in what different communities want
>from the registration data service.  Finally, it simply refuses to
>engage with the question of whether the very limitations of the
>protocol are a fundamental part of the problem.
>
>The latter is the most serious issue, in my opinion, because it leads
>them to make recommendations that are just as unrealistic as the last
>five times ICANN has blathered on about whois.  Fixing the protocol
>limitations is simply a necessary condition for doing anything about
>all the rest of it.  I sent them a public comment pointing this out
>after they posted their draft report (I also sent them private mail
>pointing out the number of technical errors in the report, most of
>which they appear to have left alone.  One sometimes gets the feeling
>that ICANN committees just don't care about technical precision, and
>this report doesn't help dispel that feeling).
>
>I think the report is a shame.  It has taken several years and not
>insignificant money to say a bunch of commonplaces, yet the report
>doesn't really help do anything about the two most serious problems
>with registration data: the protocols we have are poorly adapted to
>serving the needs we have, and the set of needs we have is in any case
>an internally inconsistent set.  The first is a technical issue, and
>we here are in a position to do something about it if only we
>understand what problems we need to solve.  The second is a basic
>problem of public policy, in which different actors want vastly
>different things from the same service.  One might have hoped that the
>report would have provided a framework for figuring out how to make
>those compromises, but it doesn't.
>
>> I'd encourage people to read it,
>> at least the first section which summarizes the recommendations, and
>> send a comment to ICANN.
>
>On this we agree.
>
>Best,
>
>A
>
>
>-- 
>Andrew Sullivan
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