[Gnso-ssr] discussion -- SAC061 -- SSAC Comment on ICANN’s Initial Report from the Expert Working Group on gTLD Directory Services

[Mike O'Connor]

thanks Stephanie and Greg for kicking this thread off so well.

let me add another dimension to the discussion — i’m going to combine a couple of fuzzy terms to coin a new one and see if it sticks.  “Policy Architecture”   

i’m involved in several WG’s that touch (or depend on) Whois, or its replacement.  the most interesting puzzler is the IRTP-C PDP, which introduced the notion of “inter REGISTRANT transfer” to the existing inter REGISTRAR transfer policy.  IRTP-C is now in the implementation process and there are turning out to be a lot of dependencies in there.  

one of the fundamental notions that IRTP-C introduced was the idea that registrars need determine whether the transfer is just inter-registrar, or whether it’s also inter-registrant.  the question is, how will registrars determine whether the registrant is changing or not?  one answer, which works in thick Whois environments, is to go look at whois data at the registry and see if registrant data is changing.  if it is, then it’s an inter-REGISTRANT transfer and new safeguards apply.  if not, it’s just an inter-registrar transfer.

when we wrote that section of the report, we knew that it was hard to do that — but we were (correctly) counting on some things changing fairly soon.  sure enough, the Thick Whois PDP has just been approved by the Board, which means that “go look at registry data” option will exist for all TLDs.  

the puzzler for me is who looks after these meta-level dependencies?  what if Thick Whois had gone the other way?  what if the EWG process concludes that registrars can’t look at that data?  who minds that “architectural” framework in the policy-making process?

mikey


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