April 29, 2008
2:33 p.m.
John Levine wrote:
Ross, do registrars have to apply for bulk WHOIS, or do they get access automatically? I'm particularly thinking of DROA/DROC who has sent me a separate pile of fake renewal invoices.
Registrars apply separately. I do not believe that DROA/DROC currently has a license with any registrar to use this data, but I could be wrong in this. They do not have a license to use Tucows/IYD data and would therefore have to obtained access to this data through other means - i.e. scraping the public interfaces, purchasing an unlicensed copy from someone who has done the same or some other mechanism that I'm not aware of. Slamming is a big problem that the public whois access program exacerbates. /ross