Afnic comments on RDAP Operational Profile for gTLD Registries and Registrars

[Régis MASSE <regis.masse@xxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

First of all, we would like to thank ICANN for providing the opportunity
to comment on the proposal related to RDAP Profile.
 
Regarding the proposal, we agree with the idea that the WHOIS protocol has
shown its limitations and we welcome RDAP as a new protocol to improve,
mainly, the security and accessibility of registration data.
 
We were hoping that RDAP Profile for gTLD would include the authentication
capability of the RDAP protocol. According to us, one of the identified
lacks of the WHOIS is the absence of differentiated access. We believe
that providing differentiated access will be a necessity in the future for
some registries, especially in regards to data privacy.

Although RDS data are public today, we would strongly recommend ICANN to
include the authentication capability in the first version of the gTLD
RDAP profile, in order to prevent future issues related to policy and
development processes.
 
This capability will not prevent public access to the RDS data as both
public and authenticated users may have access to the same data.
 
Restricting the scope of the capabilities of this RDAP profile is not the
best way to make RDAP the new WHOIS successor.
 
Best regards,

Régis MASSÉ
Chief Technical Officer
Afnic, Back-end Registry Operator for new gTLDs