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

[Kathy Kleiman]

Thanks Olof, could you kindly post these comments to our public comment box?
Tx you and so many thanks for all your help and support and guidance,
Kathy

:
> 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
>
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