[ncdnhc-discuss] Whois TF Preliminary Report Available

[Jim Fleming]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: YJ Park 

3. Difficulty to accept global policies on Whois or Privacy
When Whois TF was formed, we were told that Whois TF is to 
"only" summarize the survey responses. No policy at all.   
Sometimes I am afraid whether this TF is marching into a 
policy-making road under ICANN umbrellera. 
---

When ICANN was formed, one of their first missions was to break the whois.
Fortunately, whois is not the DNS. Apparently, the DOC/DOJ had already decided
that a "thin Registry" model was the solution to dupe people into thinking that
competition had arrived in the DNS. That caused years of delay and small group
of Registrars were added in place of the large group of ISPs, web designers and
lawyers who registered names directly with the "thick Registry". The move to the
"thin Registry" of course broke the whois, and there was little concern about the
stability and reliability of the solution. The divestiture model was selected in
advance and the technologists had to rework the software and databases. The
cash-cow DNS of course was not changed, instead, 6$/year price regulation was
imposed (with no external input) and people started seeing a wide range of
Registrar pricing and were told, that is the result of competition. Without adding
new TLDs in the first few months of the ICANN years, there was no new competition,
that came later and was too little too late.

Now people want to fix the whois, but it is likely beyond repair. One easy solution
would be to move the whois to the DNS. People could easily use DNS TXT records
to encode the information they desire under a WHOIS.SLD.TLD zone. That could
work the same for all TLDs. People could then choose to include more or less
information on a name by name basis. They could also include a DNS A Record
and provide a parallel web-based whois response. This of course will not "Fit in the
IANN Package" because it is a distributed model and does not follow the centralized
thought processes that dominate ICANN. Even though the Internet Architecture is
also a distributed edge-model, one would probably be hard-pressed to find I*
leaders who support a distributed whois, that would put "control" into the end-user's
hands and take it away from them. Also, people might start to ask why they have
to pay for a domain name, because for some people, the whois is the registration,
they forget (ignore) the DNS nameservers.

Once again, it will be interesting to see how the I* society spins their way out of
the whois mess. The solution will obviously be to protect the revenue flow, and to
lock people more into the Registrar/Registry structure, and to keep moving them
away from the solutions, as opposed to moving to the solutions to them, which is
the Internet way....

--
JF