FYI - I sent this note to the Weirds list. On 5/17/12 8:32 AM, "Smith, Bill" <bill.smith@paypal-inc.com> wrote:

Thanks all for your comments on the WHOIS report. I've taken the liberty of forwarding a link to the WEIRDS ARCHIVE TO THE WHOIS Review Team. While our work is officially (from an ICANN perspective) completed, most if not all of us maintain an interest in and commitment to improving WHOIS (protocol, data, and service).

While I can't speak for the team, your thoughtful comments are appreciated. I will note that the Report is now in the hands of the ICANN Board and additional comments may be submitted at http://www.icann.org/en/news/public-comment/whois-rt-final-report-11may12- e n.htm.

On 5/17/12 6:40 AM, "Andrew Sullivan" <ajs@anvilwalrusden.com> wrote:

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On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 01:33:57AM -0000, John Levine wrote:

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This is a surprisingly good report.

It's interesting you say that. I had exactly the opposite reaction. There are problems both large and small. The executive summary has a bad definition of what a domain name is. The report makes a number of preposterous recommendations, like that ICANN should, for some reason, start chasing all referrals in whois (because, apparently, people don't know how to use whois and this will magically enable them to do so), and attempts to extent ICANN's regulatory reach into areas where it has no business (and where it will fail anyway). It gets its history wrong, and just ignores IRIS. It makes the distinction among the service, protocol, and data but does not attend to that distinction throughout. It points out, but offers no suggestions for resolving, the basic inconsistency in what different communities want from the registration data service. Finally, it simply refuses to engage with the question of whether the very limitations of the protocol are a fundamental part of the problem.

The latter is the most serious issue, in my opinion, because it leads them to make recommendations that are just as unrealistic as the last five times ICANN has blathered on about whois. Fixing the protocol limitations is simply a necessary condition for doing anything about all the rest of it. I sent them a public comment pointing this out after they posted their draft report (I also sent them private mail pointing out the number of technical errors in the report, most of which they appear to have left alone. One sometimes gets the feeling that ICANN committees just don't care about technical precision, and this report doesn't help dispel that feeling).

I think the report is a shame. It has taken several years and not insignificant money to say a bunch of commonplaces, yet the report doesn't really help do anything about the two most serious problems with registration data: the protocols we have are poorly adapted to serving the needs we have, and the set of needs we have is in any case an internally inconsistent set. The first is a technical issue, and we here are in a position to do something about it if only we understand what problems we need to solve. The second is a basic problem of public policy, in which different actors want vastly different things from the same service. One might have hoped that the report would have provided a framework for figuring out how to make those compromises, but it doesn't.

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I'd encourage people to read it, at least the first section which summarizes the recommendations, and send a comment to ICANN.

On this we agree.

Best,

A

-- Andrew Sullivan ajs@anvilwalrusden.com _______________________________________________ weirds mailing list weirds@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/weirds