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

[Kathy Kleiman]

I see what you mean, tx Olof!
:
> Hi Kathy,
> I think that would be inappropriate, given the commenter's decision NOT to convey it by using the public comments box....
> Best
> Olof
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: rt4-whois-bounces at icann.org [mailto:rt4-whois-bounces at icann.org] On Behalf Of Kathy Kleiman
> Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2012 2:51 PM
> To: rt4-whois at icann.org
> Subject: Re: [Rt4-whois] FW: Offline comments on WHOIS Policy Review Team Draft Report
> 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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