Re: [ga] whois: issues with uniformity

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr>]

On Tue, Dec 24, 2002 at 12:17:20PM +0100,
 Vittorio Bertola <vb@bertola.eu.org> wrote 
 a message of 53 lines which said:

> 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:

I agree. IP holders take already too much space, there is no need to
acknowledge it in a technical requirments document.

> 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.

This was hotly debated in the CRISP WG (not only on the basis of
privacy but also because of the cost it will imply for the registries,
whose machines would have to act as benevolent servers for this
task). The standard IETF reply is "The requirment is on the protocol,
not on the actual registries. In other words, the service MUST be
defined, but the registries MAY choose not to implement it."

I myself have a lot of doubts about that: for instance, if this
worldwide search is implemented (for the benefits of IPR lawyers), it
will be included in the standard programs and many registries will
therefore enable it unknowingly (it already happened with the RIPE
whois server, which allows search-by-content).

Also, to continue with your comparison, once you created the atomic
bomb, there is no doubt SOMEONE will use it. Once you create such a
worldwide search service, IPR lobbyists will find one way or the other
to make it mandatory.

> "privileged" so that the access can be restricted to privileged
> accounts (which, I hope, will only be released to law enforcement
> agencies),

No, priviledged will typically mean people who pay. Do not forget that
there is an actual market for cross-registries whois searches (I know
people who make a living from it).

> 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. 

I disagree here. Why would the ICANN specify the requirments for the
future information service of .fr? The ICANN has no rights to discuss
the whois issues in domains outside of the gTLD it manages. 









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