[registrars] WHOIS - declaration of interest....
In preparation of todays call I would like to make sure all are aware of my interest in the provision of WHOIS services, as reference is made in "the proposed agreements as drafted commit VeriSign to develop and deploy a centralized WHOIS for the com/net/org registries if mandated by ICANN, at least parts of the community would be comforted by your explicit agreement that to that effect. Obviously, to the extent that such a mandate would cause VeriSign to incur additional costs, VeriSign would have whatever rights are provided under Section 22 to recover those costs, net of any relevant cost reductions." As some of you know, I am Chair of the Names Council WHOIS Committee (due to start work soliciting comments in a few weeks - taking over from the ICANN Staff WHOIS Committee), I am also Chair of the European ccTLD Registry Working Group a subset of CENTR's Legal and Regulatory Committee, and I am Chairman of the universal WHOIS company called Uwhois.com (servers in US, Europe and Asia) which provides WHOIS services as a trusted third party to a number of ICANN Accredited Registrars and ccTLDs Registries and is a universal look-up service across gTLDs and ccTLDs (and IDN) which is currently receiving between 1.2 and 1.3m queries per day. Best Paul |