Re: Re[2]: [ga] OECD vs ICANN, re: WHOIS accuracy

[George Kirikos <gkirikos@yahoo.com>]

Hello,

I forgot to mention, there are a lot of uses for WHOIS besides criminal
and TM activities.

For instance, in the WLS debate, ICANN had a public forum at:

http://forum.icann.org/wls/

All at once one day, many "supporters" of WLS came out of the woodwork,
posting statements in favour of it (many not even bothering to hide the
cut/paste nature of their statements). WHOIS analysis helped to trace
the origins of these "supporters" to SnapNames' home state:

http://forum.icann.org/cgi-bin/rpgmessage.cgi?wls;3D1175840000006C

thus showing that "support" to be meaningless. My mom and cousins might
be against WLS, but I and others won't resort to recruiting relatives
to support our point of view! It reminds me of that episode of The
Simpsons, where Sideshow Bob became Mayor of Springfield on the
strength of votes from dead people and even dead pets! ;)

Verisign's motto is "The Value of Trust", and I think right now valid
WHOIS is a big element of "trust" on the internet (since Verisign and
others haven't really done a great job in creating universally accepted
digital identity services).

Suppose we see a bunch of "supporters" of other wacky proposals on
various mailing lists, and only have email addresses to go by? We
couldn't trace them all to, say, Herndon, Virginia, or other locations,
without WHOIS... One would have to switch to more costly mechanisms of
indicating identity, thus imposing new costs on people that weren't
there before.

Sincerely,

George Kirikos
http://www.kirikos.com/ <<-- not from Virginia or Oregon! ;)


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