whois-rt-discussion-paper-09jun11

[Frank Ellermann <hmdmhdfmhdjmzdtjmzdtzktdkztdjz@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, I try to answer your questions in the order of your paper:

1 - ICANN should make clear that billing, law-enforcement, or marketing info
    in public WHOIS data are not mandatory, but MUST (if present) be correct.

    ICANN should make clear that the main purpose of public WHOIS data is a
    last resort technical contact info if all other ways (postmaster@, abuse@,
    webmaster@, hostmaster@) fail.  Public WHOIS data is primarily intended
    to help domain owners in cases of technical problems with their domain,
    including problems with registrars.  ICANN should help that registrars
    comunicate this primary purpose to registrants, i.e., most of the public
    WHOIS data is voluntary, what is published must be always correct, and
    any contact info xyz@an.eexample for domain an.example might not help if
    technical problems also affect all e-mails to domain an.example.

2 - see (1)

3 - As far as national laws allegedly do not permit a mandatory technical
    point of contact in public WHOIS data these privacy laws still would not
    prohibit voluntary data.  Registrars selling domains in these ccTLDs can
    communicate why not publishing voluntary data in new domains will result
    in no trust for, e.g., anti-spam applications.

4 - Privacy proxies are not necessarily a problem for the primary purpose of
    public WHOIS data as stated above.  Hiding e-mail addresses of domain
    owners where the domain owners anyway cannot resolve technical problems
    with their domain is acually a "good thing", but the fact should be
    obvious for third parties trying to find a technical point of contact.

5 - see (4)

Above all public WHOIS data has to be accurate, and contact info is supposed
to work especially when there are technical problems with a domain.  This is
typically not the case for e-mail addresses in the domain, and ICANN is in
the position to educate the public about WHOIS using the "annual reminders".

Sadly RFC 3912 failed to cover the "administrative" parts in RFC 954, and it
also failed to follow the IETF i18n policy in BCP 18 (RFC 2277).  It is no
rocket science to fix the i18n issue, but admittedly RFC 5198 was published
after RFC 3912.  In a nutshell RFC 5198 explains how to replace US-ASCII by
UTF-8 in protocols remotely related to "telnet", this includes WHOIS.

At the moment RFC 1032 covers the now "lost" administrative parts in RFC 954,
but RFC 1032 is obviously not state of the art.  Updating RFC 1032 should be
a job for ICANN's various WHOIS activities:  Even an obsoleted experimental
RFC published on April 1 would have more impact on the "Internet community"
than any ICANN PDF, so please update RFC 1032 wrt WHOIS.

Regards,
 Frank