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

["Ram Mohan" <rmohan@afilias.info>]

Ross,
Interesting thoughts and an interesting premise.  The problem is, that the
groups you mention here (marketers, IP folks, etc) are not the only people
who utilize Whois information.

System operators (including technicians, systems administrators responding
to abuse, etc) often depend solely on information found in Whois to
determine next courses of action for serious network and other related
issues.  This is not just a marketing/bulk messages problem ... there is
real and legitimate use of this information (which was one of the original
goals of having such a service).

Your premise is also that all individuals provide accurate information.  We
know (you definitely do, as a registrar) that some of the most egregious
violators make sure that they provide _false_ information.  Giving
individuals the sole right to provide information about them seems to swing
the pendulum too far one way.

Having said that, I was one of the team who worked with PIR to suggest the
"OrgCloak" service -- which would allow individuals to cloak personal
information from the general public for reasons of privacy.  I advocate the
protection of individual's private information from general purpose
data-mining and public abuse.  However, your suggested solution provides a
wonderful shelter for every spammer, DDoS violator and domain-slammer to
hide behind.

The Whois Task Force is working on providing meaningful recommendations
that, among other things, addresses the issue of Bulk Whois.  The IETF
Provreg group is debating adding a <privacy> element as a standard part of
the de-facto standard domain protocol (EPP).  Let's be careful not to throw
the baby out with the bath water.

-ram
--------------------------------------------------------------
Ram Mohan
Vice President, Business Operations
Chief Technology Officer
Afilias (http://www.afilias.info)
e: rmohan@afilias.info
--------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ross Wm. Rader" <ross@tucows.com>
To: "'George Kirikos'" <gkirikos@yahoo.com>; <ga@dnso.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 1:47 PM
Subject: RE: [ga] whois.txt, ala robots.txt, as a standard ?


> These are interesting thoughts George, but I really believe that we need
> to completely disengage from the current system and its implications and
> start again from scratch. This proposal and those in development
> elsewhere seem to place an emphasis on fixing the mistakes of whois
> rather than creating a system that works.
>
> Let's start the re-engineering with a very basic question.
>
> Marketers do not need more rights when it comes to my personal data. The
> trademark, copyright and patent lobby do not need further rights when it
> comes to the protection of their interests. Individuals need a very
> basic mechanism that provides marketers and anyone else who wishes to
> use this very personal data with a means to ask the individual for
> permission to use the data. Once permission has been granted, then the
> individual can provide that information to the marketer.
>
> Full stop.
>
> Thefore, the basic question is, how do we do this? We can't even begin
> to start fixing the problem until we acknowledge that customers have
> lsot control of their data. The first step towards a solution lies in
> giving that control back.
>
>
>
>                        -rwr
>
>
>
>
> "There's a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore like an
> idiot."
> - Steven Wright
>
> Get Blog... http://www.byte.org/
>
>
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: owner-ga@dnso.org [mailto:owner-ga@dnso.org] On Behalf
> > Of George Kirikos
> > Sent: Tuesday, February 04, 2003 1:39 PM
> > To: ga@dnso.org
> > Subject: [ga] whois.txt, ala robots.txt, as a standard ?
> >
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > I was reading through the latest WHOIS task force updates, at:
> >
> http://does-not-exist.net/final-report/final-report-feb03-030201v0.html
>
> and a thought came to mind. Just as there is a "robots.txt" standard for
> webcrawlers like Google, how about having a whois.txt standard that
> folks can optionally use on their websites?
>
> For those who don't want to put in anything beyond the standard WHOIS
> output (i.e. for privacy, or to avoid spam), they can leave a blank
> whois.txt on their website or omit it entirely. For those who want
> "enhanced" contact details, and want to be easily found, they can
> supplement what's already in the standard WHOIS.
>
> For instance, they can provide additional contacts, WHOIS in different
> languages, contact info for various countries, etc. This can also assist
> in the goal of WHOIS accuracy -- in case the registrant is unable to be
> reached from their existing WHOIS info, the registrar can try the info
> in their (by default) http://www.example.com/whois.txt
>
> Perhaps someone clever can even think of an XML format or something for
> this enhanced WHOIS, to allow standard tools (like other WHOIS servers,
> such as www.betterwhois.com or www.uwhois.com, etc.) to parse it. Folks
> like Alexa, for example, who already supply contact details at:
>
> http://www.alexa.com/data/details?url=icann.org
>
> (type a different URL, to see if that domain's contact info is correct)
> can crawl the web to get the contacts automatically, instead of mining
> the WHOIS, optionally for those who want to be found easily.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> George Kirikos
> http://www.kirikos.com/
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