Hi Lynn,
I echo everyone's thanks.  Quick question about questions 7 and 8 (pasted below).  I found them confusing. In question #7, what is a website domain?  Domain names are used for email, listservs, websites, FTP sites and other purposes (and some are just parked pending future use).  As the question seems to be part of our "collection of personal data" series, can we ask generally whether they have personally registered a domain name, rather than linking it to a registration with a purpose? I think that will be more accessible...

Re: question #9, the list seems a little narrow.  Business use makes sense, personal use makes sense, but what about organizational use?  Many individuals register for domain names in their own name for small political, hobby, parenting and religious organizations --- and place their own data in the Whois.

 A thought on "non-profit."  We looked at this term when designing the GNSO Council Whois studies and found it to be US-centric -- based in US tax law. The global term we found more understandable was
"noncommercial" -- e.g., many non-US based NGOs are not "non-profit" per se (as US legal category), but are certainly noncommercial.  But the more general question above about organizational use may be broader and more approachable -- as many organizations, especially those run by individuals, are not formally incorporated -- and definitely fall outside of both "business" and "personal" use.

Finally, is there a question of domain name registrant respondents asking them to search their own data in the Whois? If I missed it, apologies!  There is support for this type of question -- and it goes beyond the broad "do you know your information is provided" -- to the very specific "does your sense of what is available about you correspond to what you actually found?" I thought it very interesting that the one person who searched for his own domain name in the initial interviews was upset to find the information displayed was not what he thought it should be.

Sorry for such a long note -- I wanted to explain everything in the interest of time. In the end, I think it results in a few small changes to two questions, and a short additional one.

Best and great thanks,
Kathy
------------------------ Questions 7 and 8 below -------------------------

    7.    Do you own and maintain a website domain which you personally registered?

Yes (Continue)

No (Skip to Q10)


8.     Which of the following best describes the purpose of your website?

It’s for my Business

It’s for my Personal use

It’s for a non profit organization

:
Dear All,
Many thanks for the feedback and engagement from several members of the team.
It is much appreciated.
 
Attached is an updated copy of the English language consumer trust survey.
Our deadline for any further revisions is noon tomorrow, GMT -5 time zone, September 28.
In the interest of time, for comments and feedback, please copy in Jonathan Yardley from User Insight
(included on this message).
 
Language interpreters will be translating the survey questions for the primary language in each
of the countries we selected.  Along with that, particular examples in the questions will be
reviewed for an appropriate equivalent in each country.
 
After further discussion with the User Insight team, the approach being taken for the Whois look up site is
NOT to direct anyone to a specific WHOIS site or page.  As a result, we can expect that some participants will
report that they were unable to find the domain registrant information.  At the same time, we will get a more
realistic picture of the difficulty in finding domain registrant registration or people who think the registrar is the
domain owner.
 
As a URL to use for the lookup, my suggestion is to use http://thecoca-colacompany.com
After looking at all the other options, I feel this would not be offensive to anyone and it is a website
for a globally distributed consumer product.  After testing on search engines, I also felt that websites such as Wikipedia or the UN can lead to confusing search results
if the phrase "who owns xxxx" is used. 
 
There are some specific questions for those who do have their own domain names.  Other participants will
skip over these.
 
We looked hard at the sequence of questions and considered the suggestion to move the Whois lookup bit closer to the
beginning.  But we do have to gather some basic info about the participant at the start.  An effort has been made
to keep the questions to just the essential ones and minimize the total length of the survey.
 
Finally, in China, one or two additional questions will be added about non-Latin characters.  The research team is
checking to see if this would also be appropriate for India with Hindi.   This issue has prompted me to suggest that
in our overall report, we should include information about the number of IDNs that are non-Latin and the current technical
limitation (related to ASCII) on WHOIS records being available only in Latin character languages.
 
Again, thanks for the team support on this effort.
Lynn
 
 
 


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