[gnso-rds-pdp-wg] authoritative

[nathalie coupet]

Can blockchain technologies turn thick WHOIS data in registries into authoritative data by reducing the lag time between updates? Nathalie  

    On Monday, May 1, 2017 12:50 PM, Andrew Sullivan <ajs at anvilwalrusden.com> wrote:
 

 Hi,

On Mon, May 01, 2017 at 04:42:24PM +0000, Greg Aaron wrote:
> All that is the opposite of what the GNSO's Thick WHOIS PDP recently reasoned.
> 
> That PDP said that gTLD registries must be thick, in order to deliver a variety of benefits.  That PDP WG also wrote that: "the only authoritative data source can be the registry as it holds the ultimate sway over the data. A registrar updates the data at customer request and is responsible for its accuracy, but such changes would only become authoritative once the registry Whois reflects the change."
> 

The problem with the reasoning there, of course, is that it's both
circular and false.  It's circular, in the sense that once you define
the registry as the data authority then by definition data that is
merely at some middleman is not yet authoritative data.  So this view
can't function in any premise that the registry is "authoritative".
It's false because someone who is trying to track down what is going
on with some registered object is going to want to contact all of the
parties involved in handling any data, and so the state of the
registrar databases may be important.  (Some registrars, of course,
have adopted the mechanism of never using their own database when the
registry is thick -- a good data-handling practice, of course, but one
that has the disadvantage that the registrar's systems are only as
fast as the registry plus network latency.)

But in any case, I still think all of this discussion shows why we
should avoid the term "authoritative".  I feel rather badly that I
stuck on this point in Copenhagen (though I do believe we're better
off to highlight this conceptual confusion now instead of in several
months).

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com
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