[nc-whois] Brainstorm session

["Abel Wisman" <abel@able-towers.com>]

While being at a client and using his phone, one has little time to
watch all and thus I've written down part of what I said and post this
to you all for consideration.

from reading upon posts, talking to people off line and online, I feel
we should go back a little bit in our steps.

I have the distinct feeling that we are working on solutions to problems
that we are not even sure exist. With that I am not saying that there is
no problem, au contraire, the problems facing the whois are probably
even bigger then we anticipated and have put our fingers on.

Nonetheless it is my supported opinion that we should look at basics
before toppling the world.

We remain focussed on the current state of the whois and the solutions
to keeping it as is, while patching as good we can, not threading on
toes, not crossing contractual borders and in agreement with commercial
interest. what is left we use to please the client who's data is showing
in that same whois.

We are talking about limiting access rights, stepped access rights and
what more, while we forget that whois is what we are talking about, not
the exposed results of it's existence.

Let's for a second go back to the intention of the whois in a time the
internet was more like a local network then what it is now.

The reason the whois was instituted was to reach people when needed in
case of problems, I have posted more then once about this so I refer to
those posts to fill in the blanks.

The net grew but not our whois; it was left an open database with way to
many data that has no reason to be out there, though I admit this is a
Eu way of thinking and differs from the US way of thinking.

But back to basics: the need for whois; we have a few options:

-We leave it as is and in time commerce takes over even further and the
content will remain dodgy, enforcement will be hard if not impossible,
lawsuits will be raining down on registrars and icann over deletions
based on wrong data and governments will object to the open display of
their citizens data.

-We can start regarding it as a phonebook, in which case we should
follow suit on those rules and give people a right to be unlisted.

It would not be the hardest implementation and probably one that would
have the support of most of the big companies and the ITU

-Finally we can go to what it was, a directory with an owners name, a
tech contact and an admin contact. 

In this case we should consider to only "show" what I said above, for
more access there is the law and most if not all registrars/registries
are in a country where the law has "easy" ways to access their data.

With regards

Abel