On 12/18/2009 12:08 PM, Jorge Amodio wrote:
About the original use/intent of WHOIS: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc812
We had ARPAnet handbooks with all of our names and contact info nearly a decade before the 1982 date of that RFC. But there is a deeper issue here... John L. says that whois info is required by our domain name registration contract with a registrar. That is true. But those terms are imposed by a worldwide monopoly, ICANN, in which we domain name users have effectively no voice even though that organization has legal existence and tax exemptions for the purpose of acting for the benefit of the public. The issue here is not the contract terms themselves but, rather, the fact that even after more than a decade of existence, ICANN is not accountable to the public. Even after a decade ICANN acts more like an enforcement arm of the intellectual property protection industry and a money pump for the domain name registrar community than it does as a protector of the public interest. If internet users had a real voice in the setting of those terms in the contract, and if ICANN were to be able to excuse itself from restraint-of-trade laws, then perhaps I (and perhaps some others) might be willing to accept the whois rules in the contracts. But absent accountability, absent a role for users to have a role in the making of those contract terms, and absent a reason to excuse ICANN's restraint of an open and competitive marketplace, then those contract terms should be treated more as the diktat of an overlord than negotiated contract-terms. --karl--