[gnso-rds-pdp-wg] Instead of Less Access to Fewer Data Fields How About More Access to Newer Data Fields

[Rob Golding]

Hi Michael

And welcome to the group :)

> For example
> a .BRAND could have a field indicating where the registrant was a
> company owned store or a franchise.  I could see this being
> information that a consumer would like to know.

Whilst I agree, there is information that may be of some value to a 
'consumer', WHOIS (or any replacement) is not a place they'd look for 
it, nor necessarily the correct place to put it.

Number of WHOIS lookups for .com names we are registrar for and we host, 
April 2016 - 1,256
Number of web pages of .com names we are registrar for and we host, 
April 2016 - 3,715,372

That's 0.03%

Even just taking the number of unique IPs (and incorrectly assuming that 
equates to 1 'consumer' each), April 2016 - 524,604

So 500 times as many people look at a website than a whois - 'consumers' 
would be far better served if that data was simply on those web-pages 
(which is 'law' in some countries anyway)

> This would include collecting and publishing
> additional data fields in the Whois that they deemed in their best
> business interest.

And that I think is the "heart" of the debate, and where I think most of 
the possible confusions start to enter the discussion - what is in 
"their best business interest" - it belies a misunderstanding of who 
"owns" the data.

Under UK & EU (and possibly other locales) the data about a 'person' is 
owned by that person, and they should have the decision about how it is 
used, whether it is kept, if it is collected, and under what 
circumstances (which should default to NONE) it is 'published'

> So if RightSide decided that they wanted to publish the children's
> names of all registrants in the Whois for their .FAMILY TLD, they
> should be free to do so.  While I do not know in what parallel
> universe where this would be an optimal/good business model, as long
> as the collection and publishing of this data was NOT in violation of
> any local/national laws I do not see why ICANN would be able to block
> this service/feature.

If such a business-model existed, (putting aside the sensibility and 
legality of it) I'd still think whois was not teh appropriate place for 
it, plus there would still be the major 'problem' - that data served up 
by a machine, mostly to other machines, is scraped/kept/misused/etc

Sadly, since the 1st caveman scrawled on a wall with a burnt stick, 
we've had "record keeping" with the associated problems of security, 
access, visibility, retention, longevity - if only they'd sat down and 
hashed out a tokenised systems with automated revocation that could 
temporarily grant limited and controllable access to specific data 
subsets for limited/defined/specific purposes, which is otherwise 
securely locked away ;)


Rob
--
Rob Golding   rob.golding at astutium.com
Astutium Ltd, Number One Poultry, London. EC2R 8JR

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