Re: [ga] whois.txt, ala robots.txt, as a standard ?

[Karl Auerbach <karl@CaveBear.com>]

There is a rough convention about putting a zone's contact information
into the zone records itself.  This convention is not much used and the
formats are not universally applied, and credit for the idea has been
attributed to several different people.

For example, in my cavebear.com zone, I have a set of TXT records that may 
be retrieved by doing a TXT record query to "whois.cavebear.com".

The result you will get is

;; ANSWER SECTION:
whois.cavebear.com.	172800	IN	TXT	"fax-number: +1.831.423.8357"
whois.cavebear.com.	172800	IN	TXT	"phone-number: +1.831.423.8585"
whois.cavebear.com.	172800	IN	TXT	"address-1: 218 Carbonera Drive"
whois.cavebear.com.	172800	IN	TXT	"address-2: Santa Cruz, CA 95060-1500"
whois.cavebear.com.	172800	IN	TXT	"other-stuff: This site is operated by Karl Auerbach"
whois.cavebear.com.	172800	IN	TXT	"address-3: USA"
whois.cavebear.com.	172800	IN	TXT	"company-name: CaveBear"

Some folks have adopted a more XML-like representation in the TXT records.

The amount of text per name is limited, but with enough names and TXT 
records even large documents can be expressed.  For those who want to give 
it a whirl, run the following query and see what you get (expect about 
525 lines of output).

	dig @npax.cavebear.com mc.cavebear.com axfr

The mechanism of putting the information into the zone itself lets the
zone owner control exactly what is, or is not, published.

The point of all of this is that there is no need of a public "whois" at
all.  Sure, the registration businesses can keep their internal business
records about who signed up for what and when they need to be rebilled to
prevent the domain name remover from removing their domain names.  But
those records need not be made available to the public, to those who mine
data, or those who make claims they have special privleges to look.  And
Trademark people can be, as they ought to be, required to demonstrate to a
neutral magistrate that there is enough evidence of harm to the trademark
owner's interests for them to have a peek at the registration data.

		--karl--




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