Re: [alac] Draft Terms of Reference for Whois Task Force

["John R Levine" <johnl@xxxxxxxx>]

I don't know whether this is to the current negotiation, but I'd like to
see something about ensuring WHOIS access to legitimate users.

A nearby ISP and I provide secondary DNS service to each other, a very
typical setup.  Since I am a faster perl programmer than he is, I wrote a
little program that runs every week and figures out which of his domains
are nearing expiration and which have expired, by checking the WHOIS data.
Its use of whois is quite moderate since it remembers the results from
last time and only rechecks domains that are close to their expiration
date, and the total number of domains we're talking about here is small,
about 1100, spread over many registrars.

Nonetheless, a while ago a computer at Network Solutions decided that I
was abusing their whois server and blocked access from my entire network.
I could deal with that if there were some way to get unblocked, but as far
as I can tell there isn't, since they've never responded to any of my
attempts to contact them.  I realize that whois scraping is a problem,
but it's hard to see how the modest number of lookups I've been doing
would set off someone's scrape-o-meter, and it stinks that there's no
way to correct errors.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@xxxxxxxx, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor
"I shook hands with Senators Dole and Inouye," said Tom, disarmingly.