One of the recommendations of the IRTP-B Policy Development Process (PDP) was for the GNSO to investigate requiring all gTLD Registries to use a "Thick" Whois. With thick Whois, all of the Whois information related to a registration is maintained by the Registry. With "Thin" Whois, the only information maintained by the Registry is the current status of the registration and identification of who the sponsoring Register is; the rest of the information and specifically that related to the Registrant is kept by the Registrar, making Whois a widely distributed database. Currently most Registries use thick Whois, and thick Whois is required for all gTLDs to be created under the new gTLD program. The only Registries that use thin Whois are operated by Verisign, but these of course include .com and .net which constitute the majority of gTLD registrations. In response to the IRTP-B recommendation, the GNSO requested and Issue Report and a preliminary version is now available and has been posted for public comment. Comments on this document will be received until 30 December, 2011. See http://www.icann.org/en/public-comment/thick-whois-preliminary-report-21nov1.... The report confirms that the issue is within the scope of ICANN and the GNSO and recommends that the GNSO initiate a Policy Development Process on the issue. The primary purpose of this comment period is to ensure that the Issue Report does indeed address all of the relevant aspects of the issue. However, it will likely also be the only formal opportunity for the ALAC to state whether it recommends that a PDP should be initiated or not. I have not yet reviewed the document in sufficient depth to say whether I feel that it is complete, but on an initial review, it looks fine. My personal belief is that the ALAC should strongly support the initiation of a PDP on this issue.