[Rt4-whois] FW: Offline comments on WHOIS Policy Review Team Draft Report

[Olof Nordling]

Dear Review Team Members,
Please find some offline comments to the report, received today, for your attention and considerations.
Very best regards
Olof

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Sullivan [mailto:ajs at crankycanuck.ca] 
Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2012 4:38 PM
To: Olof Nordling
Subject: Offline comments on WHOIS Policy Review Team Draft Report

Dear Mr Nordling,

In my public posting commenting on the recent WHOIS review team report, I mentioned that I found some nits.  I'm sending them to you as the staff support for the team.  These are some (occasionally very
serious) technical errors that I found while reading the Whois Policy Review Team report.  I didn't include them in my public posting because I thought they might distract from the more substantive issues I wanted to focus on there.  But I urge the team to fix these errors; they seriously undermine the credibility of the report.  Please feel free to share this mail as widely as you wish.

    - The description of domain names in the Executive Summary is
    either completely wrong, or a mistaken and misleading attempt to
    gloss over complexities about the DNS name space. This might not
    matter except that, if people are to take seriously proposals for
    better management of domain name registration data, the details of
    what a domain name is really need to be correct.  Rather than
    fixing this, the entire passage might be removed without any harm:
    someone who cannot already recognize a DNS name will probably not
    care about WHOIS at all.

    - The introduction of WHOIS at the end of section B seems to
    suggest that WHOIS is for domain name registration data; but the
    WHOIS protocol has also historically been used for number
    resources (as Appendix G states), and that history may be part of
    the reason why the protocol has some of the limitations it has.
    This could be fixed with a minor adjustment to the description.

    - The mention of alternatives to the WHOIS protocol in Chapter 5
    (footnote 17, page 44) talks about CRISP.  But CRISP is not a
    protocol, and RFC 3707 is in fact a requirements document -- one
    that, if its specification were met, would address many of the
    issues with the WHOIS protocol and permit a better service.  The
    IRIS protocol (RFC 3982) was the development that followed from
    the CRISP requirements.  The narrow issue could be fixed by
    altering the reference.  (At a more substantive level, IRIS was
    what resulted the last time the Internet community determined that
    WHOIS was not the answer to registration data problems, and the
    report might be stronger if it explored why those previous
    attempts to replace WHOIS did not succeed.)  

In Appendix G:

    - The example IP address is not in any normal presentation format
    for IP addresses, and it is very hard to see how it could be an IP
    address in any of the more obscure ways of writing IP addresses.

    - DNS is not only used to translate names to numbers.

    - The entire discussion of whois lookup in a thin-registry context
    ignores the way whois referral works, and appears to suggest that
    people who do not know how to operate the tool ought to be able to
    operate it without learning how.

In Appendix H:

    - The definitions of A-label and LDH-label most certainly do not
    overlap.  

    - WHOIS was not originally specified in RFC 954, but in RFC 812,
    published in 1982.

Best regards,

Andrew

--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at crankycanuck.ca