What can be done to reduce "unreachable" Whois registrations by 50% in 1 year?

[Patrick Vande Walle <patrick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Your initial question on Twitter was: "What can be done to reduce
"unreachable" Whois registrations by 50% in 1 year?" 

The answer is quite
simple: change your policy and enforce existing ones. 

The WHOIS dates
back to an era where Internet nerds were few and held each other in esteem.


Nowadays, the Internet is full of villains. Consequently, even honest
people who have nothing to hide feed inaccurate records in the WHOIS,
because they do not want their private phone number and home address
displayed for all to see, when at the same time they ask their telco for an
unlisted phone number in order to prevent unwanted phone calls. 

By
offering some privacy in the WHOIS to honest people, you will mechanically
see the number of correct records rise. Make the WHOIS a safe place for
honest people. Only those who have some not-so-legal activities will
continue to hide behind fake records. Throughout the centuries, criminals
have always hidden behind fake identities. Why would that be any different
today ? 

Once this is done, enforce existing policies and really take down
down domains with invalid records. 

The TELNIC model (and upcoming .CAT
model) for the WHOIS should be generalized to all gTLDs, regardless of
their jurisdiction. It is not a question of allowing the registry an
exception in order to comply with local law. It is a question of protecting
people's privacy from those with less honest intentions. 

Those who have a
legitimate reason to access full WHOIS records are few. The average user
does not have any use of the WHOIS information. Those who need it should
ask for it, show their credentials and explain why. 

On the technical
side, sort out the issues regarding character set display for non US-ASCII
strings, update the list of required records. Who uses a fax nowadays ?
There are proposals on the table. The ARIN REST model comes to mind, and
would allow authentication and access to full records for legitimate users.
Centralize the WHOIS database at ICANN so you will not have to wait for
contract renegotiation with registries and RAA revisions to start
implementing it. It only needs a decision by the board to actually start
the deployment. 

Finally, do not take another ten years to implement the
above-mentioned suggestions. The delay in acting on WHOIS has been as
detrimental to it than the irrealistic policy itself. 

Respectfully
submitted, 

Patrick Vande Walle 

Former ALAC and SSAC councillor