Danny Younger wrote:
The issue being dealt with concerned the uses of BULK Whois data -- anyone may currently purchase BULK Whois data from a registrar (with annual fees for such data access limited to a $10,000 cap), or from a registry. Just by way of example, during the month of December 2007 VeriSign issued 1,781 passwords for third party bulk access to the .com zone file.
Verisign's zone file access program and the registrar bulk whois access program are administered under different policies. This is important to note because the data being accessed in both cases is extremely different. The zone file does not contain any personally identifiable information whereas the whois does. There are not 1,781 users of the bulk whois program across all registrars. I would be shocked to find that there were more than 20 unique users. /ross