[registrars] Whois HELP

["Michael D. Palage" <michael@palage.com>]

Hello All:

As you are aware, I am a strong advocate that the current Whois is broken
and needs to be seriously overhauled to met the collective needs of
registration authorities (registrars & registries), law enforcement,
intellectual property owners, as well as consumers and privacy advocates.

One of the pieces to the puzzle that I need is documentation in the form of
statements from individuals/registrars that have registered domain names
with unique email addresses associated with the Whois information with a
registrars that does not provide bulk access but nevertheless have still
received junk mail, spam, etc. In trying to make my case to various parties
regarding registrars' concerns about whois data mining, people have asked
where is your proof that the data is being mined and that people are just
not getting these email addresses from other sources. I know a number of you
have used this technique in the past. I need you to help me document this
fact.

Another piece of the puzzle that I need are registrars that can document
high-volume queries to the their whois servers that have compromised system
performance. Similar to the claims in Register.com v. Verio. I know that
there are several registrars that are using rate query limiters on their
whois, as well as scripts that rotate the whois fields in port 43 to combat
this problem. Could those registrars that are using these defensive
mechanism provide statements why these safeguards were put in place.

The third piece of the puzzle that I am looking for is documentation of
questionable marketing schemes. The Palage family itself has been a victim
of these questionable marketing practices but again I am looking for
documentation. If you only have hard copies please fax them to me at
+1-561-828-3290.

This is not just a North American centric issue but a global one. Therefore
I am looking for documentation from registrar and registrants from around
the world.

As I begin to assemble the pieces of the puzzle I will keep you all
informed. I hope to have a rough draft available by Shanghai.

Mike