Re: [ga] whois: issues with uniformity

[Vittorio Bertola <vb@bertola.eu.org>]

On Mon, 23 Dec 2002 10:02:17 +0100, you wrote:

>The WG is named CRISP (Cross Registry Information Service Protocol),
>its Web page is
><URL:http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/crisp-charter.html>. I believe
>that former GA members will specially be interested by the Requirments
>document
><URL:http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-crisp-requirements-02.txt>.

I will definitely send a comment to that WG, but I'd like to hear an
opinion from other GA participants - especially about the following
sentence (§2.4.2):

>Intellectual Property Holders have legal rights to the use of domain
>names based on copyright and trademark laws of various governments.

I wouldn't think that the IETF is in the business of deciding who has
rights to the use of domain names... but even if they want to be, the
sentence is clearly incorrect: IP holders have legal rights to some
uses of certain alphanumerical strings, and have a right not to see
domain names used in infringement of such rights, for example for
cybersquatting or improper competition. But they do not have "legal
rights to the use of domain names" more than any other registrant.

The document then includes other very worrying proposals - for
example, it requires the new system to allow for worldwide
cross-registry searches for domains registered by a given registrant,
even by substring. There is a provision for some data to be marked as
"privileged" so that the access can be restricted to privileged
accounts (which, I hope, will only be released to law enforcement
agencies), but, for example, there is no provision for *operations* to
be marked as "privileged". 

I think that those operations that allow to systematically track down
the activities of individuals on the Internet should be limited to
privileged accounts. Perhaps this limitation should be introduced only
for domain names registered to individuals, and not for those
registered to companies or other entities.

However, my bottom line is: this document is not a technical
specification, but it is a requirement specification for a technical
service. Any technical manager will tell you that requirements are to
be written by the non-technical customer, with techies acting just as
support to translate the customer's needs into technically meaningful
language. In other words, this document (differently from the rest of
this WG's work) should be discussed in ICANN, not in the IETF. 

And there's no worse policy than that made by a group of engineers
that say (as they say at the beginning of their document) "we are not
going to address policy issues". The atomic bomb was born this way.
-- 
vb.            [Vittorio Bertola - v.bertola [a] bertola.eu.org]<---
-------------------> http://bertola.eu.org/ <-----------------------
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