Re: [ga] Whois database

["William S. Lovell" <wsl@cerebalaw.com>]

Picking up on an old theme as I browse, there was a bill
in the U.S. Congress that would prohibit copyright on
data bases, mostly to protect scientific access to scientific
data, but should apply here also.  Don't know the status of
that bill right now, but someone might want to look it up.

Bill Lovell

Sandy Harris wrote:

> News story on NSI selling the whois database information:
>
> http://www.msnbc.com/news/531732.asp?0nm=-1AP&cp1=1
>
> Best read, I think, in conjunction with Auerbach's rant on
> the whois database, ponit three under "What I would say to
> the House Commerce Committee were I invited to testify" on
> the menu page at:
>
> http://www.cavebear.com/cavebear/growl/index.htm
>
> I'd say one of the more useful things ICANN could do to
> improve the net would be to make it clear to the contractors
> that treating the data they manage for the net as proprietary
> (let alone selling it!) is completely unnacceptable.
>
> While they're at it, ask them to fix whois which has, in my
> view, been broken since shortly after NSI started running it.
>
> Even if a single central whois covering the whole net is no
> longer practical, we want one broken down by TLD so things
> can be found easily, not by registry. That is certainly
> administratively convenient for the contractors, but not
> remarkably useful to users.
>
> To my mind, questions of getting the existing system to do
> things right (fixing whois, getting rid of board squatters,
> censuring stupid decisions like bodacioustats.com, getting
> ready for DNSsec deployment) are as interesting as questions
> of fixing the system itself (adding constituencies, etc) and
> far more likely to produce useful results soon.
>
> I'm emphatically not saying we should give up trying to change
> the system, but it may be more productive to focus on specific
> problems like this NSI action or the absurd tatas decision.
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