[gnso-rds-pdp-wg] For WG Review - Redlined Problem Statement

[Rob Golding]

On 2016-08-25 01:01, Greg Shatan wrote:
> I think we are have a vocabulary problem: I think you are misreading
> what "consumers" means here.  I have always understood the reference
> to "Consumers" to mean consumers of goods and services

Yes, that's exactly the way I see it, which is why # of whois queries is 
basically meaningless, unless balanced against something like # of dns 
queries
i.e. some way to see how many people "consumed" a service vs looked for 
"domain contact info" for that servoce

I did some queries earlier, as someone posted April WHOIS counts, 
comparing number of requests for A/AAAA records vs number of WHOIS 
queries for the same domains, which is way under 0.001%

Sadly there is no (obvious) way to directly equate the # of dns queries 
to individual "consumers" as the accessing IP data isn't kept > 30 mins 
(and may not be a 1:1 relationship anyway with so many providers using 
dynamic and proxy connections)

For example accessing a website over our mobile phone provider shows 
their servers doing the resolving, not the current IP of the mobile 
phone, and it has some level of caching as refreshes of the pages dont 
redo the query, and using a 2nd phone also doesnt redo the query

So 1 dns query could be 1 access by 1 consumer, multiple accesses by 1 
consumer or multiple accesses by multiple consumers
- it would however give an "at best x% of consumers do a whois"

> Assuming that is correct, I won't deal with the rest of the email,
> which is predicated on what I understand to be a fundamental
> misunderstanding of the classes of "stakeholders."

I'm interested numbers to support (or not) this "idea" which contradicts 
my direct experience as both a Registrar and Registrant, that 
Registrants do any significant amount of WHOIS lookups of their domains.

The only time I recall doing regular whois of my own domains was when 
consolidating them to our registrar and looking at the status changes 
during the process - compared to my getting daily reports using an API 
checking the nameservers of my own and domains I have an interest in. 
Could I use whois for that - for most tlds, yes - but I hate the idea of 
scraping text when there are better options available.

Rob