From: Jay Daley <jay@nzrs.net.nz>
Date: 18 February 2011 10:24:40 AEDT
To: ccNSO Members <ccnso-members@icann.org>, "ccTLDcommunity@cctld-managers.org" <cctldcommunity@cctld-managers.org>
Subject: [ccnso-members] Technical evolution of the WHOIS

G'day

At the Catagena ICANN meeting there was a workshop entitled "Technical evolution of the WHOIS" that I accidentally found myself attending.  It began with some presentations from IANA staff and an ICANN director on what was wrong with the WHOIS and how that could be solved by moving to a new service, which would be fundamentally different from WHOIS.

A number of issues were raised with this initiative, beginning with the fact that WHOIS is very popular, serves a useful purpose, has a great deal invested in it by registries, registrars and third parties and no case has been made that it should be replaced.  Similarly no case has been made for the proposed new features they wanted to add to a replacement for WHOIS and the last time this was tried, with IRIS, there was little interest.  

There were also expressions of concern at the process for something as major as recommending the replacement of WHOIS with another protocol, which should not be a workshop with a few technical presentations and little publicity as the impact is far wider than this.  It really is not a technical issue and calling this initiative the 'Technical evolution of WHOIS" seems to be way of introducing a major change by the backdoor.

The resulting discussion was inconclusive and afterwards ICANN published some reports and set up a wiki with all the relevant documents:

   https://community.icann.org/display/TEwhoisService/

and a low traffic mailing list (tech-whois@icann.org) to facilitate ongoing discussion:

   https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/tech-whois

We in .nz have written a detailed submission to ICANN in response to this initiative, which raises our issues with both the substance of the ICANN reports and the process:

   http://internetnz.net.nz/system/files/submissions/internetnz_submission_on_technical_evolution_of_whois.pdf

Another workshop is being planned for San Francisco with agenda still under discussion on the mailing list.  The current proposal is that a cross-constituency working group consider a new service to provide the functionality that WHOIS does not have and see what support that has before any discussions on replacing WHOIS.  If you are interested in this then please join the mailing list or come along to the next workshop.

cheers
Jay

--
Jay Daley
Chief Executive
.nz Registry Services (New Zealand Domain Name Registry Limited)
desk: +64 4 931 6977
mobile: +64 21 678840

76 Temple Road, Oxford OX4 2EZ UK
telephone: 01865 582 811   mobile: 07540 049 322
emily.taylor@etlaw.co.uk www.etlaw.co.uk