I'd like to keep the whois information closer to the registrant, at the registrar. The further away from the registrant the more out of their control their own information becomes. There is no disincentive to stop the registries from leaking the information to anyone. The thick requirement increases their costs (and system complexity) which they pass on to us. Also, if they have this responsibility they will put pressure on use to make expensive proactive validity checks so that "their" outputted information is pristine. A thick registry makes services such as whois privacy protection more difficult (as some of those types of services change, for example, the email address periodically and therefore would have to communicate all those changes to the registry). Database synchronization is a problem with the thick model. If the registries want to provide a universal whois service or need it for some other purpose they can ask for the information and be white listed. We have too many protocols for moving the whois around, why move it with EPP too? Let's standardize on one: IRIS. Let's require the registrars to output it in a standard format but allow optional output as well; the reseller information is only one type of optional information that some of us choose to output. I agree with Larry Erlich and also with Bruce's proposal, I'm OK with the per-registrar model (the registrar chooses). If the complexity increase is problematic, then just make it thin. Paul Has anyone considered another alternative: depositing the whois at a common third party across all ICANN-contracted TLDs? Not the registries and not the registrars? -----Original Message----- From: owner-registrars@gnso.icann.org [mailto:owner-registrars@gnso.icann.org] On Behalf Of Marcus Faure Sent: Monday, July 26, 2004 12:06 AM To: Larry Erlich Cc: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine; Bruce Tonkin; registrars@dnso.org Subject: Re: [registrars] .net thick/thin discussion Hello, even with a thin model, the first point of contact is the registry, e.g. you have to go to the Internic whois first before you know which other whois to query. Therefore the registry must be monitored closely, but IMHO doing your own whois does not help here. Sitefinder is a keyword for this discussion. As long as we do not have standardized whois output, a thin model is more difficult to deal with. I also think that the per-registrar thin model that Bruce proposed will cause this extra work, and honestly I do not believe that the average user understands it. A registration service provider can be handled with an optional maintainer field in the whois. We have one on the CORE whois that defaults to the member number, but can also contain a URL. Yours, Marcus