[gnso-dow123] Purpose of Whois : registrant or "agent"

["Jordyn A. Buchanan" <jordyn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Various constituency statements that we have seen thus far express  
different views on whether the purpose of Whois is to contact the  
registrant or simply a representative of the registrant.  For  
example, the IPC constituency statement indicates that the purpose of  
Whois is to provide the contact information for "domain name  
registrants" and the ISP statement agrees that the purpose is to  
provide contact information for "the individual or organization that  
has registered a domain name".  On the other hand, the NCUC statement  
indicates that the purpose of Whois is to provide a link to a  
"responsible party who can either act to resolve, or reliably pass  
information to those who can resolve, ... problems".  (I removed the  
word "technical" from the NCUC statement simply to focus this  
discussion on who is being contacted, not what types of problems are  
at issue.  There is a separate thread on the types of problems Whois  
is intended to resolve.)

Issues:

- Is the purpose of Whois to provide contact information for the  
registrant, or simply someone (presumably acting on behalf of the  
registrant) capable of resolving the relevant issues?
- Without skipping ahead to the discussion of the various contact  
types, if the purpose is to provide contact information for the  
registrant, is it also necessary that additional contact information  
be provided to resolve certain problems in a timely manner?

It's important that we start to discuss and resolve some of these  
issues on-list.  We've cut back the frequency of our phone calls on  
the assumption that we can be more productive on list, but we need to  
see some activity for that decision to make sense.

Jordyn