[gnso-rpm-wg] Inferences (was Re: Mp3, Attendance, AC recording & AC Chat Review of all Rights Protection Mechanisms (RPMs) PDP Working Group)

[George Kirikos]

Hi folks,

Just following up on some statements from today's transcript:

On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 3:51 PM, Terri Agnew <terri.agnew at icann.org> wrote:
> Adobe Connect chat transcript for 12 July 2017:
...
>   Jeff Neuman:My belief is that we have a huge rate of people abandoning is
> because (i) registrars were mining the system, (ii) registrants were mining
> the system to see what was valuable, and to a lesser extent as a result of
> the claim (either legitimiate or not)
>
>   Jeff Neuman:But I cant prove any of those theories
>
>   Kathy Kleiman:@Jeff: we have gathered evidence already from registries;
> there is probably more
>
>   Jeff Neuman:There just is no way to do so on a backwards basis

If one had access to the raw data (and presumably The Analysis Group
would have had it, to generate their reports), one could filter such
"mining" by examining abandonment rates by (1) registrar and (2) by
time relative to the launch date.

i.e. presumably those were "mining" the system were not spreading out
their queries across all registrars equally. It would be easy to
identify the outliers. Furthermore, registrants would be also focused
on a few registrars that permit those bulk lookups, and they wouldn't
spread their queries over time equally --- they'd be focused at the
launch (i.e. the beginning, first few days, etc.) of a TLD.

Of course, if need be, one could anonymize the data by registrar (i.e.
Registrar 1, Registrar 2, etc.), if there are any concerns about
revealing their individual abandonment rates.

Registry operators and registrars both have technology to block WHOIS
access to those who are "mining" that data. One can use similar
detection techniques in this instance.

Sincerely,

George Kirikos
416-588-0269
http://www.leap.com/