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WHOIS Review Team - Public Comment

  • To: whois-rt@xxxxxxxxx, Rob Golding <rob.golding@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Subject: WHOIS Review Team - Public Comment
  • From: Cameron Gray <cameron.gray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 07:28:55 +0000

During the process of implementing Othello's registrar systems we have had a constant uphill battle implementing transfer protocols: -

1) With Thin Registries
 a) Constant rate-restriction and/or blocking despite originating from
    RADAR registered IP sources.
 b) Most, if not all, registrars also fail to provide all of the
    required data via their public WHOIS service. (I appreciate this
    may be under the guise of protecting their customers' privacy,
    however when a domain transfer is initiated this data is required).
 c) We currently have 38 format conversion types registered with our
    systems, and this barely scratches the surface of used formats -
    only the ones we've had to retrieve details from so far.
 d) There is little standardisation, including what a voice number
    looks like, despite a regular expression being provided by the IETF
    in the EPP-1.0 formal specification.
 e) As there is no standardisation, and only half of the registrars
    provide 'headings' to their WHOIS output, reconstituting structured
    data is often impossible.  This leads to a complete loss of faith
    by the registrant, at worst legal threats about stolen domains.

2) With Thick Registries
 a) The single contact across multiple domains methodology is broken as
    90% of these domains are with different sponsoring registrars, and
    only one of them may have access at any given time.  Obviously every
    registrar /must/ provide the ability to update the contact details
    so each registrar duplicates the data.
 b) Following on from the above, most registrars do not include contact
    transfers as part of the domain transfer process, as they consider
    it related to their customer rather than the domain, again breaking
    the single contact method.

So from the above, it doesn't appear to matter which method the Registry follows for handling registrant data, the methods offered to registrars for obtaining and gaining control of that data prove difficult to non-existant.

Whilst WHOIS provides a valuable service to the general internet community, this is the only method we have to facilitate domain transfers - a process and level of data access diametrically opposed to those expected of a public WHOIS system.

--
Cameron Gray, Systems Architect
Othello Technology Systems Limited
http://www.othellotech.net | http://my.othellotech.net | http://support.othellotech.net

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