[Gnso-impl-thickwhois-rt] [for iRT review] Draft Thick Whois Transition Policy for .COM, .NET, and .JOBS

[Rob Golding]

>   1. A thick Whois model offers attractive archival and restoration properties. 
> If a registrar were to go out of business or experience long-term technical failures rendering them unable to provide service, registries maintaining thick Whois have all the registrant information at hand 

As a registrar who has been the "recipient" of a number of domain portfolios of defunct/de-accredited/closing registrars, I can say that there is no appreciable difference at all in the "quality" and "validity" of the data between thick-whois registries and thin-whois-registries.

* The Contact Data about Registrations, whether available via Registrar (thick model) or Escrow (thin model) has been entirely dependant on the Registrar concerned, and nothing at all to do with the storage model. 

* There have been more (numerically) problems with contact data for thin-whois rather than thick-whois which is because there has been an 850% difference between the number of registrations between the two models, percentage-wise it's "roughly even" (marginally skewed as there have not always been any thick-whois registrations to transfer from de-accredited registrars) 

>   2. A thick Whois model reduces the degree of variability in display formats.

Of the field-labels, maybe, but that is largely supposed to be covered by other Policies.

>  3. Establishing requirements such as collecting uniform sets of data, and display standards, improves consistency across all gTLDs at all levels and result in better access to Whois data for all users of Whois databases (e.g. law enforcement, Intellectual Property holders, etc).

It _may_ change the level of consistency, whether that's an _improvement_ is a different discussion, and really best left to the PDP on RDS

>  4. The uptime of the registry with respect to Whois data has typically been found to be better (at least marginally) than the registrar. 

With more-and-more restrictions on WHOIS data access / limitations, along with the quite-poor IPv6 support by some Registries, whilst IPv4 WHOIS *uptime*may be better than certain registrars in certain regions, it wont change for most (100% is 100% - there is no possible improvement on it) and dependant on Registry/Registrar, may significantly reduce access/availablility

That's regarding ##4 as a general statement for policy. 

When you bring _specifics_ like the Registry concerned being Versign(GRS) most if not all of those concerns go away - although it does introduce a single-point-of-failure (one location for whois data for a tld) that does not currently exist.

So I disagree that any of 1-4 are actual valid benefits / reasons (although I do agree with the policy overall)

Rob


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